My thanks to all who offered advice and suggestions since last Saturday afternoon, when something went really bad with the computer at home (I am posting this from the town library)--it's too bad I never got to see such suggestions and other assistance, as I had immediately disconnected the internet connection.....and then Sunday morning, when it became obvious nothing could be done, I ripped the tower open and hammered all the pieces, including the hard-drive, whatnot, into bits. It was already destroyed before I did that, and I didn't want to deal with it anymore, thus the hammer.
This past Monday being a holiday, I had trouble getting a hold of any computer experts, but I succeeded, and was told the source of the problem. (It was a virus, not a hack.) I was surprised that I had barely uttered a sentence and a half, and the guy already knew what it was, and what had happened.
At first, he thought my reaction was a little over the top, but then when he finally remembered who I am, he decided, yeah, that was an okay reaction, because getting a new tower is preferable to any other possible solution. And so I'm headed to the big city after I get done writing all of this, to discuss what's available--also since my internet service deals with cellular telephones, I'm going to see what might be available there too.
This is NOT to say I'll come back here with a new computer (tower); it takes a couple or more days, as the guys there twiddle with one, remodeling it to what I specifically need, to my specifications, or whatever. So I'll just have to be posting from the town library at least until later this week.
That was one Hell of a virus, so well done, so solid, so substantial, so unremovable, which is why I ended up smashing the tower to bits (not out of anger; when something becomes a piece of junk, no longer usable, I just rip it up so as to see what's inside of it, before tossing it away).
The computer guy said the usual remedy is to have the computer gutted and then everything reinstalled again--but of course since I never had anything "valuable" on any computer I've ever owned, it's probably just better to scrap what I had, getting one more up-to-date. All I lost of any value were my avatars, and while many of them can be gotten back using Google "image" search, the one I can't is the photograph of my fellow alum Skins, which the Sarge also used as an avatar for a short while. If anyone has that, I'd appreciate a copy of it, as I was rather attached to that particular avatar.
My fellow alum was never as famous as Henry R. Luce or Clare Booth Luce, so I don't imagine one could find it on a Google "image" search.
That's the only thing I irretrievably lost, that one avatar.
I've never stored anything of value on computers, even though I've been on the internet since 1996. There have been losses of information, but minor. One time I lost jpeg images of a certificate of death from Washington, and a Western Union telegram sent to Johns Hopkins Medical Center, returned to me marked "recipient not known here" (the real-life copies ended up in law-enforcement files, where one assumes they will get dusty and yellow and crumble apart).
The worst thing I ever lost when a computer went down was the famous "Norway ping list" for freerepublic, which explains why freerepublic has been woefully absent of news from Norway for about four years.
But generally I don't put anything of value on a computer, preferring to have real-life hard copies of such stuff.
This last tower (the hard-drive and all that other stuff) lasted me four and a half years, and I had paid $100 for it, and so I got no complaints. All good things must come to an end, after which one goes out and gets another good thing. And besides, this time, maybe the Kodak printer/copier/scanner can be installed correctly; in the now-demolished tower, I got it to copy, to print, to scan, but I couldn't convert scanned images into jpeg images. Maybe a second time, but in a newer machine, will do it.
God is good, and I must again say that I have been on the internet since 1996, and one supposes that the longer one has been on the internet, the likelihood of some sort of mischief increases. This was my first, and I hope only, virus, ever.
If "Virus Research Lab 2009" pops up unexpectedly on your computer, well, you got problems.
