Monday, April 7, 2008

To Kill a Mocking Virus... Part 1...

I usually don't fall for random messages from Yahoo Messenger, that lead you to click on a URL that practically invites a virus into your house. But, in my apparent stupidity, I still fell for one of those messages. It was from a past co-worker in PeopleSupport. And just like that, I got infected by some malware/worm/deadly virus queen that kept replicating itself the longer you have your PC on.

I don't know if it was pride or something else, but I really tried battling the damn virus. Chasing it with all these anti-virus programs and anti-spyware (i.e. Norton, AVG, Spybot, etc.). I tried every possibility available to me. But to no avail.

After an entire weekend of battling the damn virus, I finally gave up when even TrendMicro's HouseCall web based anti-virus scanner didn't work to quell this vicious beast. To HouseCall's credit, it was the only scanner that was able to identify the source/deadly queen virus file. The damn thing was hiding itself in a ".sys" file. Nonethless, that was my last shot at trying to save my PC. So I decided to essentially press the metaphorical reset button and reformat.

During the past Earth Hour, I was in total darkness with only my PC and my fridge that's running. On April Fool's Day, every LCD display and PC/laptop was fired up in order to begin the long arduous process of "backing up files". My place was lit up like a Christmas tree.

Backing up files in my case is not a very easy task. Not only are all my band's album files in my PC. But also all my music, TV shows, and movies that I have downloaded that I haven't burnt on DVDs yet. I'm talking about 40 gigs worth of recorded tracks, 130 gigs of music, and God knows how big of a total the TV shows and movies were. Each 720p TV show episode I download is 1 gig large. So you can just imagine the amount of files I have to back up. That's not to mention all the little itty-bitty files that I'd want to keep. I'm an electronic pack-rat, I know.

So with every other distraction possible around me to keep me from getting stressed about the virus, I burnt DVDs, freed up space in my hard drives in my PC, old PC, and laptop, etc. etc. At least, watching Dave Matthews and blogging on my laptop kept me from going insane.

The file transfers took so long that I started staring at the goldfish screensaver on my old PC. I guess it's the closest thing to having a real goldfish aquarium without the hassle of maintaining it.

I finally got all my files backed up after a good number of days. So I ended the last backing up files day and will start reformatting my PC the following day.

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