The good news: The Big Black Critter's home from the shop!
More good news: The evil program is gone, gone, gone!
The bad news: So is everything else!
Yep, evidently the problem got so bad that Windows actually crashed out, so they did a format wipe and reinstall. Luckily, my last-minute salvation DVD burn was uninfected, so I saved the pictures I really wanted to save. Unfortunately, all my settings and programs and such are history. I'm in the process of reloading stuff as I type. (My latest issue: trying to get Outlook Express to remember how to reach my e-mail account.)
Oh, well... I needed to clean the hard drive up anyways...
So, today has been spent reinstalling programs and various other bits of hard drive clutter (Word files, pictures, games, etc.) I have a few more things to do - restart my Money budget, a game or two I'd miss if I didn't have them on hand - but for the most part I'm back to where I was, with one exception.
I read a rumor online that my nemesis, the evil malware program, might be capable of writing itself onto flash drives, creating an autorun file. One thing I use extensively is a flash drive. It has all the latest versions of my stories on it, so I can go back and forth between the Critters. I haven't touched it since the BBC went in to the shop, because I don't want to infect the laptop with the big boy's germs. Now, I don't want to reinfect (and rewipe, and reinstall) the desktop tower.
I have two options:
1 - Plug in the flash drive and hope against hope it won't contain anything evil.
2 - Chuck the old flash drive and start over from scratch. (Well, not quite scratch - I have older versions backed up elsewhere - but the work of the past several months would be toast.)
Oh, well... I was thinking about restarting anyway.
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Yikes - neither is a good option. I suppose the budget doesn't extend to sending the flashdrive to the shop to be checked?
PPG - Unfortunately, I'll probably have to skim my savings account to squeak by as it is, and that's with a smaller-than-anticipated repair bill. (They only charged for the Windows reinstall and a dust-out; that's why I wonder if my little write-up helped them avoid extra hours dinking around with things that hadn't worked. Or maybe it just crashed out too fast for them to do anything but wipe and reinstall.)
Did I mention I'm keeping an eye peeled for secondary employment options?
Actually, there's a reasonable likelihood that the flash drive is uninfected; the place I found mention of the autorun issue stated that it would overwrite existing autorun files, and this particular flash drive never had one of those. (It did, however, use the term "also," which makes me skittish - would it add an autorun file to a flash drive that didn't already have one?) This thing crashed out Windows, it got so bad... I'm just paranoid enough right now to seriously consider starting over from scratch, using the older versions on my hard drive as a rough template and charging ahead from there.
Oh - I forgot to mention a silver lining to the wipe. It took care of a problem I'd been trying to deal with for some time, namely Roller Coaster Tycoon 3. In addition to absolutely no beta-testing and gameplay-ruining flaws that made it no fun whatsoever, the thing was so screwy that I couldn't ever play it, insisting always that I had the wrong disk in the drive. (Sometimes it wanted the expansion pack, sometimes the primary disk, and it never seemed happy with what I tried.) I couldn't even uninstall the thing, because it always wanted whatever disk I didn't have in the drive to be in the drive. Happily, RCT3 went to Silicon Hell along with PG2009.
So that was nice...
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