Well, it has happened yet again. It seems like about once a month or so my work PC ends up catching a virus, a trojan horse, or some other piece of malware. Today it was a virus, and it was a particularly nasty one.
First of all, it corrupted one of the most important Windows XP system files which rendered the system unbootable. In fact, it wouldn’t even boot into Safe Mode. After much tweaking, I was finally able to get it to boot into the “Command Prompt” version of Safe Mode which allowed me to overwrite the corrupted file with a copy of the one from my laptop. That fixed the booting problem, but…
When the PC booted up into Windows, my anti-virus software real-time protection mode wouldn’t activate, ultimately leaving me with no choice but to uninstall the program and then re-install it. Talk about a hassle! At first the corrupted anti-virus installation refused to be uninstalled (thanks to the virus that caused the problem in the first place), but after manually removing a couple of files it finally agreed to ride off into the sunset.
I then downloaded a fresh installation package for the anti-virus program from the vendor’s website and began the install process, only to have it fail – not once, but three times! The fourth time was a charm however, and after the installation was complete I initiated a full scan of all drives. That scan is still in progress some 45 minutes later, so I’m actually writing this little diatribe on my laptop.
Hopefully the scan will find and remove the offending virus(s) and all will be well. If not, I suppose a hard drive format will be next on the agenda.
I know exactly how I got the virus – I got it the same way I always get them…
I receive anywhere from 300-400 emails per day, and most of them are spam or contain attachments that I have no interest in opening. When I hold down the CTRL key to select them all for deletion, every so often all of those “bad” emails will simply open up all on their own, allowing any attached viruses to install at their leisure. You gotta love Microsoft Windows!
Well, today one of those nefarious emails obviously contained a virus, and now I’m having to clean up one doozy of a mess. I guess that’s the price I have to pay for having my email address splattered all over the web on the websites that I maintain, but I really have no choice in the matter. For now at least, I’m at the mercy of the email harvesting robots and the good folks from Microsoft.
Instead of holding the CTRL button down, try hitting CTRL and the “A” button. Should prevent that from happening. You using Outlook Express by any chance? I’d recommend switching to Thunderbird. It has built-in anti-SPAM functions that are good for sorting out the good from the bad.
Oh, you have to click one item first before hitting CTRL and A or it won’t know what to select.
Unfortunately, most of us do not have your skills @ getting rid of those nasty viruses. You are a “whiz”