Never a dull moment.

Today has been a very interesting day, to say the least. It started out mildly enough - our biggest plans for the day included the hope that it would finally be warm enough outside to break out our new double stroller and go for a nice walk with the babies...

Then we signed onto the computer, and everything sort of went downhill from there. We have been having this issue with pop up ads the past few days, literally 10 of the damn things would come up just by my opening explorer... so last night we had used an online virus software and found a virus and eliminated it, though it warned us if we did not BUY it, the virus could come back. But last night, everything seemed fine. This morning, the pop ups were back... so, we spent the $20 and bought the virus software. The moment it was downloaded on our computer it was obvious that something was wrong...

The computer would not shut down. It would not fully boot up - it was a big mess. So we called dell... nearly crying over the mess our beautiful brand new dimension 8300 was in, and after over 2 hours on the phone with them, we had come to the conclusion that we had the "blaster" worm, and on top of that we had screwed everything up by downloading a different virus software while we were still running our (useless) McAfee. Note to everyone: Never ever, ever, ever try to run two virus detecting software's at once - it destroys your system. So, dell told us we had to wipe out everything and reinstall it, and they would send us all the disks to do this. Fine. We were defeated - our beautiful new computer would be a worthless nothing for 2 or 3 days until the "fix everything" software got here that dell was sending us.

I decided after my husband got off the phone with them that there was no way I was going to give up. Using the neat little code they had given us to keep the computer from automatically shutting down after 60 seconds of running (like it had been doing) I kept it running long enough to destroy enough of the extra antivirus software that, when I rebooted it, our windows came back! And, amazingly enough I was finally able to revert the drive - and the computer is back to working perfectly again!! (I am *SO* proud of myself!!) And here my poor husband spent 2 hours on the phone with the "experts" and they could not even do it... sheesh.

The one downside that I am irritated about? My husband now knows I have a rather intricate spyware system on this computer. He was sitting right next to me when I went to revert the drive, and the revert time it gave me was for Monday, at the exact moment I had installed the software - so I caved and told him what it was... in a way I am relieved that I am not being "sneaky" about having the detailed computer records anymore - but then of course on the other hand I know he will now probably do his best to mind his "P's & Q's" even better... I just hope it's not like that - I hope he is not going to change anything... I hope there is nothing for him to change.

He has been saying and doing EVERYTHING right recently. Just as long as it's genuine... everything is ok.



02.29.2004
4:25 p.m.