I want to get back to writing. Believe me (or better yet...doubt me and buy one of my books from www.lulu.com/spotlight/Misticuf), I'm a better writer than I am a computer technician. I'm no slouch when it comes to computers, but sometimes even the best of us get a chunk of our Fruit o' The Looms bitten off by a virus.
I mentioned (several times, if memory serves) that my old Compaq running Windows 98 finally bit the dust. Unfortunately, when the motherboard finally gave up the ghost a month or so ago it took the hard drive out with it. I liked that hard drive. It was 130 gigs and worked well, even with my souped up Windows 98.
My mom and stepfather sent me one of their old computers and I love it. It's runnning Windows 2000 Professional and I dutifully loaded Service Pack 4 on it, bringing it handily into the realm of "Running Everything I need And Then Some".
The only hangup (literally in some cases. I use free dialup internet) was that I couldn't install antivirus. Everytime I started to get the files cooking, the antivirus shut down.
Know what that means? ...Virus.
The only problem I have in running old software is that updates are hard to come by. This includes fixes for viruses. They're out there, but you have to be able to root around the nether regions of the internet to find them. I'm no stranger to the netherworld of the etherworld.
Then the light came on. One of those stunning moments of revelation where one is faced with the choice between getting really, major-league pissed off at the cretins who create viruses or slapping one's own forehead and proceeding to fix the problem. I chose, as always, the latter.
You see, I figure it takes a special kind of moron (Yes, I'm proudly a special kind of moron) to use his jump drives to transfer files between an old laptop that hasn't had virus updates installed since 2006...and the new computer he just got. Took me until a couple of hours ago to figure out the reason I haven't been able to restore Windows 2000 Professional to the desktop is...I'm using infected media to do the job.
The clever sumdebitch won't win. This laptop will spend the rest of the night downloading the megabytes of virus updates. Then I'll scan the system, make it clean, and go back to re-installing Windows 2000 Professional (I have the files I need to do it...on a currently infected jump drive) and get on with what I really want to do: write books.
Ahhh... I feel better now. Knowing I have the solution to the problem always makes me feel better, even before I implement it.
By the way...do me a favor and entertain yourself: buy a David J. Steele book or 3, or 4 or 5. www.lulu.com/spotlight/misticuf
No comments:
Post a Comment