There are days...and this is one of them.
Feb. 13th, 2001 12:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpApparently, my experience with the virus I received earlier today (it was the "Here you go" virus) was rather mild compared with some other folks' experience. JSC got hit rather hard, but that's to be expected, as everyone around here is connected to everyone else, and everyone uses Outlook, which only streamlines the infection process, it seems.
Then again, a colleague who attends law school locally also got a screenful of virus-generated mail when he checked into his law school account, so it seems a lot of people have been hit. Also, it would appear a lot of people don't upgrade their virus-scanning software, since a defense against this particular bug has been known for some time (August, if memory serves).
Receiving the virus made me think about the last time my McAfee software went out on the web to get the latest, greatest patches, so I fired up the software and...it didn't like the look of one of the DLLs on my hard drive and proceeded to give up the ghost.
I rebooted the machine. Same story.
I cold booted the machine. No joy.
There are days when I feel my only purpose in life is to reboot my computer over and over again. Today was one such day, to the point where I feel that the virus that arrived in the mail was the least malevolent aspect of the day.
After my abortive attempt to get Eudora to run the other day (including a couple of tries at some of the fixes I got from the Qualcomm web site), I wrote the upgrade off as a bad deal and started to use Outlook Express. In the handover between mail clients, I missed an important e-mail, but was able to recover before any major damage was done. Once that danger was past, however, Outlook began to behave erratically in the middle of the afternoon, which is to say it stopped responding almost immediately after being launched.
Eudora dies a horrible death, McAfee refuses to function, and then Outlook decides to play games.
Some people have all the luck. And cold booting did nothing to solve the problem, either.
Whoo-eee!
About the only software that appeared to work without trying to drive me crazy was my browser - which unwittingly allowed me to share the NEAR Shoemaker landing - and the LJ Windows client. (By late afternoon, all it would have taken to make me crazy was a nine iron, but I digress...)
In any event, by the time I realized the time of day, it was too late to go anywhere, so I turned to the more mundane aspects of life, such as laundry. Washers and dryers are pretty straightforward pieces of equipment that do not require rebooting (and if I have anything to say about it, never will...at least not in any house I inhabit), so things went well, and I no longer have a critically low supply of clean linen in the house.
Too, after scouring the junk in the house, I've accumulated a coffee can full of pennies. Initially, I'd rejected the idea of going to one of the local yuppie-haven supermarkets and putting them through a machine that counts loose change and outputs a voucher exchangeable for cash (minus a hefty percentage), but after timing how long it took to roll $2 worth of pennies, I figure it would take me a couple of hours at least to finish the job, so maybe the house vigorish is worth it. We're talking a big coffee can, here, and it weighs a ton.
I think I'll run by the store on the way home after my shift (I seem to recall the place is open 24/7), cash in the coppers - which haven't had copper in them for almost 20 years, BTW - and maybe pick up a light load of groceries. Food has been getting in critically low supply, too, and I'm getting pretty sick of eating udon noodles for breakfast, anyway.
Cheers...
Then again, a colleague who attends law school locally also got a screenful of virus-generated mail when he checked into his law school account, so it seems a lot of people have been hit. Also, it would appear a lot of people don't upgrade their virus-scanning software, since a defense against this particular bug has been known for some time (August, if memory serves).
Receiving the virus made me think about the last time my McAfee software went out on the web to get the latest, greatest patches, so I fired up the software and...it didn't like the look of one of the DLLs on my hard drive and proceeded to give up the ghost.
I rebooted the machine. Same story.
I cold booted the machine. No joy.
There are days when I feel my only purpose in life is to reboot my computer over and over again. Today was one such day, to the point where I feel that the virus that arrived in the mail was the least malevolent aspect of the day.
After my abortive attempt to get Eudora to run the other day (including a couple of tries at some of the fixes I got from the Qualcomm web site), I wrote the upgrade off as a bad deal and started to use Outlook Express. In the handover between mail clients, I missed an important e-mail, but was able to recover before any major damage was done. Once that danger was past, however, Outlook began to behave erratically in the middle of the afternoon, which is to say it stopped responding almost immediately after being launched.
Eudora dies a horrible death, McAfee refuses to function, and then Outlook decides to play games.
Some people have all the luck. And cold booting did nothing to solve the problem, either.
Whoo-eee!
About the only software that appeared to work without trying to drive me crazy was my browser - which unwittingly allowed me to share the NEAR Shoemaker landing - and the LJ Windows client. (By late afternoon, all it would have taken to make me crazy was a nine iron, but I digress...)
In any event, by the time I realized the time of day, it was too late to go anywhere, so I turned to the more mundane aspects of life, such as laundry. Washers and dryers are pretty straightforward pieces of equipment that do not require rebooting (and if I have anything to say about it, never will...at least not in any house I inhabit), so things went well, and I no longer have a critically low supply of clean linen in the house.
Too, after scouring the junk in the house, I've accumulated a coffee can full of pennies. Initially, I'd rejected the idea of going to one of the local yuppie-haven supermarkets and putting them through a machine that counts loose change and outputs a voucher exchangeable for cash (minus a hefty percentage), but after timing how long it took to roll $2 worth of pennies, I figure it would take me a couple of hours at least to finish the job, so maybe the house vigorish is worth it. We're talking a big coffee can, here, and it weighs a ton.
I think I'll run by the store on the way home after my shift (I seem to recall the place is open 24/7), cash in the coppers - which haven't had copper in them for almost 20 years, BTW - and maybe pick up a light load of groceries. Food has been getting in critically low supply, too, and I'm getting pretty sick of eating udon noodles for breakfast, anyway.
Cheers...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2001-02-12 11:16 pm (UTC)I always find that the latter two options work quite well at convincing a computer to... well, compute.
Chirstyn
no subject
Date: 2001-02-14 12:34 am (UTC)Me too. God, do I empathize. Hope you can get your computer problems resolved without too much hassle.