Thursday, 10 November 2011

The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.

Hmmmmmm. This was said by Colin Wilson, English writer, part of the Angry Young Men literary movement, apparently. It doesn't sound particularly angry to bear disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain. But who knows? Cows might be angry inside.


I am doing very well at not being angry inside, or indeed outside, at the moment.

Yesterday, I declared, would be incident free and drama free. More fool me. I'm attracting Bad Karma like a magnet at the moment.


Last night, my computer contracted a deadly virus which appears to have wiped all my work. I say 'appears' - because according to the computer hospital where I rushed said computer by computer ambulance, blue flashing lights, sirens and all this morning, they are 95% certain everything is still there, just hidden by a page the unmentionable hackers have put up.


Please do not bother to tell me:

  1. I should have backed up my work more regularly
  2. I should have checked that my Firewall was up to date
  3. I shouldn't have clicked on the pop-up, apparently from Microsoft, telling me I had 'critical errors which might lead to hard drive failure'
Believe me...


Will this experience make me be more responsible about backing up and computer security in the future?

Another hmmmm. Answers on a postcard.


Posted by at
Labels: , , , ,

4 comments:

  1. Peter Neame11 November 2011 at 01:17

    login in safe mode and make the files visible again - happened to a neighbor of mine....
    Google to the rescue

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown11 November 2011 at 10:53

    Hello there! Lovely to hear from you.

    That was the first thing Pete tried but sadly it looked the same in Safe Mode. He muttered about creating a boot disk but really hasn't the time and could do without the frustration. Hence the computer hospital option.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Peter Neame11 November 2011 at 21:42

    These are my notes from the repair - they may or may not be useful.
    Took me 2.5 hrs - first time I've made money doing computer repair. And on Windows, that I normally don't use. Not bad!
    My first reaction was "what a piece of junk - just buy a new box....". And then I thought it might be quicker to fix it.
    -------
    Called in to repair an unresponsive computer -

    On-screen was something called "Windows XP repair" This is a Trojan/Virus program that asks for payment to “unlock the next step”

    Reboot computer - comes up again purports to have random (and large) amounts of disk space missing as well as other problems. Unable to quit without reboot. On reboot, "Windows XP repair" takes over the computer again.

    Checked that there were no critical software or documents on computer - only Medical Office Manager, which can be reinstalled.

    Rebooted in safe mode and found very little on the computer that was available.

    Used Windows XP Service Pack 2 to repair disk - 2 passes before a stable boot was obtained.

    No sign of user-specific documents or a runable copy of Medical Office Manager

    Windows XP Repair Trojan seems to also work by making everything invisible - set user and program files to visible.

    Deleted a couple of folders that appeared to be downloaded games.

    ---------------------------------------

    ReplyDelete
  4. Unknown11 November 2011 at 22:06

    Thanks so much for these. I've forwarded them to Pete. Another friend has had the same thing on his work computer so I'll pass them on to him as well.

    One of the suggestions was that it might be the Duqu virus, Son of Stuxnet but I think that you're right!

    Pete says hi!

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)