Phendrana Drifts

So as near as I can tell, our computer has four problems, of varying degrees of complexity and annoyance.

1. The sasser worm was downloaded onto our computer. 13 days ago to be exact, as a result of my downloading of a certain computer program on Kazaa. Not that I condone that sort of thing. But that was the start of something very bad. Why was our computer susceptible, you might ask? Well, I can't say 100% for certain, but McAfee VirusScan did pick it up, quarantined it, and cleaned it. As well, I didn't download the security update from Microsoft in due course. Certainly my fault as the system's administrator. Obviously in the time between its downloading and the detection it still found a way to install itself on our computer. I'm not quite savvy enough to understand how, but I know no one ran the program.

2. Five separate spyware/adware programs installed themselves on our computer, a direct result of the sasser worm. Some of these suckers were easy to remove, one remains... and I've tried a lot to get rid of it. Yes, including formatting both of our hard drives. How it escaped that is actually beyond my computer knowledge. But it is nasty.

3. Our computer continues to take an inordinate amount of time to shut down or restart. Again, no good idea why, and I'm certainly not computer illiterate, so how or why this is occuring is beyond me.

4. Our CD Writer no longer reads CD's. At all. The drive is properly connected (or at least it was) and the computer recognizes it as a drive, but CD's inserted simply aren't read. The old CD drive I tossed in there doesn't work either, but it seems to be a different problem. Plus that drive is ancient and I would believe it has physical problems, like the door not opening (which seems to be the case).

One sick computer. But I've learned lots. Especially about our various programs meant to make these things easier (or at least recoverable) like VirusScan, Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy. Not to mention I've learned tonnes about viruses.

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