Sunday, March 28, 2010

Good news, bad news ...




(These panoramas are uploaded at full size; click to see them LARGE)

There's good news and there's bad news. The good news first: the computer should be salvageable, and I haven't lost any data (yet). The bad news: the system that's gone down with a rotten, lousy, insidious virus that's been lurking in the background is the quad core which handles the big, powerful programs ... like DAZ, Bryce, Serif and so on.

So, at this moment I don't have any real access to the system that does the artwork, and it's driving me batty!!!! Things just stop working for no apparent reason. First webpages are unreachable. Then browsers crash on startup. Then the windows clipboard won't allow anything to be copied to it. Then every link on a Google search results page,when clicked, results in a page redirect ... to a BAND on MYSPACE!!!!! And on and on and on.

It's a virus, nothing else it can be to produce this weirdness. AVG missed it utterly, so we uninstalled that and bought Avast. Here's the problem: Avast won't install. The virus again??? So I tried to reinstall AVG ... and it won't reinstall. Now I have no virus protection whatsoever on the quad core, so it's quarantined from that swamp of infection and infestation otherwise known as the WWW.

Next, we did a lot of work on my laptop to bring it up to date, and I was going to switch over to that for emails etc. And now, darned if I can get it to go online. So I'm on borrowing Dave's computer (we're starting to run low on available systems here: only two left after this one, and one of them is unavailable, and the other is ooooold and slow).

It's been a wonderful day (sound of sarcasm there), with about 6-7 hours blown off trying to install things that didn't want to be installed, and get computers online when they have no intention of complying. I guess I'll surrender for today and try again tomorrow.

Sigh.

Jade, 28 March