Viral infection

Maybe for me.. but surely for my computer! So I’ve been suffering from a terrible, relentless cold over the past week but that’s hardly worth any internet footage. But what is worth it is the fact that my computer contracted something over the weekend. Something that made it crawl like a learning baby, slowed it enough to alarm me and even went as far as disabling the battery. What was worse is like some haunted movie, it made a sound every few minutes as well. Something that sounded like disco drum beats and lasted a few seconds at a time. It was as creepy as it was crawly, if you get my drift.

 

So the first thing I did was to investigate the Task Manager to see what the heck was sapping all that speed that I had so lovingly configured and bought. Turns out there were 3 instances of Internet Explorer which held a large chunk of memory, even though I haven’t used IE for as long as I can remember. Shockingly each time I “ended” the task, it reincarnated itself and sat atop the memory usage pile, in essence occupying my strong systems’ wholesome memory. Surely it was a virus. My Norton that came with the system had expired a few months ago and lets admit it, how many of us renew it anyway? Neither did I. Big mistake apparently for the second I typed “iexplore.exe”, the default words that followed it were – virus, infection, worm, etc., none of them leaving a shadow of a doubt of what had gotten hold of my poor laptop.

 

The next step was of course to detect where the worm was lurking and so after reading a bunch of forums (which took insanely long), I downloaded something called PrevX CSI. And it was a free scanner only. But under 5 minutes, it diagnosed 93 infections. 93! A frisson of shock later, I tried hunting for a trial version (which wasn’t available) to clean it up. All along my computer’s performance kept declining steadily and this called for quick action… not something to ponder and then regret.

 

30 minutes, 2 restarts and 30€ of PrevX – licensed purchase later, the computer is back up and back running and fast again. All bugs gone. System protected. Sometimes, it is worth buying the good stuff. And I can’t tell how relieved I am not to hear those disco beats again. I swear it felt like the virus mocking me.