I guess everyone on my email contact list already knows this, but my laptop was recently flooded with truckload of spyware, viruses and God knows what other nasty computer stuff. It all started when I was playing this game on MSN called Insaniquarium, which has a free version and downloadable enhanced version. I played the free version, and couldn't get enough of it, so I downloaded the enhanced version, which costs $19.99, but allows one hour of free trial playing. Thing is, once it started, the game went on for as long as I was playing it, and I knew once I stopped I wouldn't be able to continue. So yours truly, the nutcase, spent one whole night playing the game until like 5 o' clock in the morning, before my eyes were shot and my hand was numb from holding the mouse so long. This is what happens when you're a jobless bum like me with too much free time (but I do have an interesting job propect, which I'll blabber about later on). Anyway, I had to eventually stop playing and shut down, but I so wanted to finish off the game, and I had the bright idea of trying to get a registration key off some other website. Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm such a cheapskate. That's what you get for growing up in Malaysia where everything is pirated and people don't wanna pay through their nose for original stuff. But hey $19.99, is like probably almost RM80 or some crazy price like that... and I don't have a credit card to pay for it anyway. Haha, excuses, excuses *Carol kicks herself*. Anyway, I did look around, downloaded some dodgy stuff from dodgy website and before I knew it, all these alerts were popping up all over the place saying my comp had been infected with all sorts of nonsense, particularly spyware.
So after another night of desperately trying to figure out how to fix the problem, I decided that the safest thing to do was to just reformat my C drive and get rid of those things once and for all. Luckily, my comp has nothing really important on it that hackers would reaally care about since it's not used for business and I don't have any credit card info on it (as I don't HAVE any credit card. Haha, the upside of being too poor to get a credit card. :Þ). The only thing I was worried about was hackers using my email to send viruses and other nonsense to people on my contact list, hence my nice warning email to everyone on my list. So I transferred all my important documents, pics, music, whatever, to my home desktop, read up really well on reformatting drives, before I let 'er rip. And now I'm typing this on my freshly reformated and hopefully nonsense free laptop.
Actually I'm kinda glad this happened, even though it took me so many hours to get everything installed and running again, coz' it was a good learning experience. Of course, first of all, I learned not to download stuff from dodgy websites (actually, I already knew, but since I never had any serious problems like this before, I was like "What the heck!"). I also had to learn how reformat a drive, reinstall Windows, and all stuff. And since I don't want my laptop to experience another spyware attack again, I did a lot of research on my desktop on what good programs I can download to protect my laptop. And I found out there're actually a lot of good antivirus programs on the net like AVG, BitDefender and Avast. I'm using AVG now, which I hear is pretty good, and takes up way less space than Norton. When I installed Norton before, it really slowed down my comp! And it didn't help when my comp got flooded with all that nonsense. It just kept flashing popups, saying my comp was infected. I was like "Yeah Norton, I know very well my comp is infected, so fix it already!". Haha, of course, I know I can't expect an antivirus program to remove spyware, but it was just so annoying... There's also software like Spyware Blaster, Spybot and Ad-Aware that protects the comp from spyware and adware. And I also decided to use Mozilla Firefox as my internet browser from now on instead of Internet Explorer, coz' I learned that spyware and other crap can get into my comp just by browsing a dodgy website using Internet Explorer, which easily affect Windows coz' IE is integrated into Windows. But that doesn't happen with Firefox coz' it's not integrated, and it's quite secure. So I actually was forced to learn a lot of helpful stuff about protecting my comp, which I never really bothered about before. Yay! And the best part is all the software I mentioned earlier are all FREE! Double yay! Free is good! Good is free! :Þ Of course, my desire for free stuff is what got my into this problem in the first place, so maybe free is not always good.... Haha! *Carol kicks herself again*.
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