Guilty!

I'm guilty.

Yes, I admit it, guilty. I used to sort of smirk when my parents or someone else with less than current computer skills would complain about their computers being slow. "Must have caught a virus or something," they'd muse. Sure, I'd feel a little tiny bit sorry for them, but at the same time somewhere deep in the darkest recesses of my mind, over there behind the cheesy memorized song lyrics, I'd hear a little mean voice saying "tell them 'I told you so' tell them! Tell Them!!!"

"Ha! we never get viruses on our computer. We're too smart, too savvy," brags the mean voice.

Well, this week, that little voice took a beating.

It all started so innocently, so stupidly.

I was installing some new software from a CD. I put the CD into the drive but nothing happened. No matter what I tried, the drive refused to do anything with the disk. I put other disks into the drive and they worked fine. I put the offending disk in another computer and it worked just fine. Hmmm... My CD drive simply hates this one CD. Strange!

And here's where I made my one huge mistake -- my one critical failure, my tragic flaw. I had heard or read somewhere that sometimes when you are installing software, your anti-virus software will interfere. So, innocently and with the best of intentions, I disabled the AV software and tried the disk again.

"Ha! We can fix this!" bragged the voice.

No luck! Thwarted, I immediately opened a browser and began to search the 'net looking for clues.

"Um, what?" asked the other little voice in my head, the nice voice, the one that keeps me honest and asks the tough questions. I hadn't heard from it the whole time until then.

"I. IMMEDIATELY. OPENED. A. BROWSER..." I began, irked that the nice voice was interrupting.

"Nooooooo!" I think at this point the nice voice went over and punched the mean voice in the face.

Crappity. I neglected to re-activate the AV software. And I browsed all over looking for CD drivers, hints about why my one CD wouldn't work, etc.

So of course now there's a virus on the computer. The braggy voice is cowering the corner, muttering gibberish and drooling.

I thought I had it all fixed, thought I managed to remove the virus. In fact, the computer worked well for a whole day, but today a warning popped up, saying something about some files in a quarantine.

SUPPLEMENTAL

Turns out this latest scare was not the actual virus, but a leftover in a backup/quarantine and it was easily removed. Ha, told you we'd fix...