Samanathon.com

Hello. My name is Saman and I have a Virus.

It all started about a week ago, when I trusted someone I thought was trustworthy. Now here I sit. Alone and afraid, with a sore bottom.

I installed a piece of software that – my gut told me not too, but I ignored it and did it anyway. Immediately, Norton cried foul. I instantly knew what happened – I WAS INFECTED. And by “I”, I mean my computer.

I’m always giving people advise on how to avoid getting viruses and here I was, thinking I was invincible – isn’t that always the way these things go . . .

Luckily for me, there is an ointment for my particular problem: Norton Ghost. I travel with a base line image of my machine (meaning: recently updated XP-SP2 and a couple of registry tweaks – no software or documents) and had backed up all of my documents and program files about a month ago. I didn’t loose much, just some recent emails and my pride. Other then that, I wiped the Ubuntu partition off of my machine. I realized that I was spending way more time getting Linux to work then actually getting any work done in Linux!!!!! I really wanted to like Linux – I did! But my time is so limited. When I’m home, I don’t get a lot of computer time and when I’m on the road, I am playing catch up on all of these projects that I have going on. So, I’m back on XP and it’s good to be home. When I’m here, I know what to expect. I know what I have to do to force things to work and when they crash, I can fix it.

Oh, and my bottom was sore because it took a while to try and diagnose, wipe, ghost and restore.

On the positive side: I installed Firefox 2.0 and I really like it! There are a couple of new features that will take some getting used to. If you liked FF 1.5, I think you’ll like FF 2.0.