I’ve been rather quiet online lately. That’s due to a couple of factors coming together, but the chief culprit was a bad case of sirefef virus. This is one extremely nasty virus that is devious in every respect. It hides itself amongst the windows files, taking a random name and reinstalling itself. It also damages system files, which I experienced when my computer would no longer boot in safe mode. Not only that, but it installs itself into your restore points, so if you roll the system back, you just get a different copy of the same virus.
I tried for three days to remove the virus, and may have been successful. Problem was, I don;t trust that virus and the system was not quite right in ways I couldn’t really put my finger on. The main thing that got my Spidey sense tingling was that my anti-virus software was quarantining new installs every 4 minutes. I powered off overnight, and in the morning, that activity stopped. Hmm. The virus killed itself while the power was off? I doubt it.
I tried manual removal, but never did find the files that were supposed to be there, though I did get sent to a website with software that says it will remove it and fix a number of other problems. It has been shown to be a scam to buy an expensive support contract. Screw that.
I finally decided to wipe out my system and reinstall everything from scratch. Fortunately, I learned long ago never to keep my data on the boot disk. I always use a separate hard drive for data only. Obviously, this is not fool-proof, but it has saved my data several times.
At any rate, the computer is back to about 80% of where it was. I still have some software to reinstall, and I’m waiting for that big surprise from Microsoft when I have about 500 updates to install when I turn off the computer.
One thing I haven’t been able to reinstall and reconnect correctly is Tweetdeck, the utility I was using for Twitter. It must seem like I died to Twitter. I was quite active, but between the virus and the vacation, I have been pretty quiet.
Another effect is that I lost yet another week of ground on Fishpunk. I’ll be picking that back up as early as tomorrow. I’d like to get that released before the end of Summer. Book sales in July have been dismal.
