Good Mood.

[swestrup]

Despite the fact that my computer is in a state of mostly-not-there and mostly-not-configured, I find I've been in a very good mood for the last couple of days. I don't particularly understand this, but I shant argue against it either.

I mean, there are a bunch of things I'd rather be spending my time doing right now, than bootstrapping myself back into an operational computational state, but such is life. I'll get to my other projects eventually.

I suppose I wouldn't be as happy if my backups hadn't been as recent as they are, but I don't expect to have lost anything from this debacle, other than time and my preferred program settings on a few thousand pieces of software.

I am taking my time putting things back together though. After being reminded about it by designergirl I added Avast! to my set of anti-virus tools, and it immediately found that my laptop was infected with a classic virus. ie, one that resides in memory and attaches itself to every executable that you access. It also phones home and asks for trojans to upload to your system. Its been a LONG time since I've seen this kind of virus (not since the 80s) . None of my other anti-virus tools had seen it, so it was able to spread unchecked.

So, this means that I had to format the laptop since just about every .exe on it was now infected. Its no big deal though, as I backed up all of my data from it when I got back from California, and hadn't used it since. I had been idly wondering if I should reformat it anyway, as I'd had a virus infection in California, and wasn't 100% sure I'd gotten everything. Well, looks like the answer to that was YES, so now I'm rebuilding two machines at the same time, and virus scanning everything before it gets installed.
 

 

Comments

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I like Avast. I forgot about it because I haven't set up anyone's PC in a while.