Warning – It Could Happen To You!

Well Sunday was a pleasant day until my laptop got zapped by a bad virus. What was I doing when this virus struck? I know exactly what I was doing and I will tell you the details and what happened and how much it cost to straighten out, errrrr!

I was online viewing CMFads.com and they have a new program going where people pay .20 cents for 50 clicks or something like that. So I had opened up a row of 5 blogs while the CMFads.com main site was still open.

While these pages where open I kept getting a pop-up that asked me if I to open or save the file and if memory serves me correct it said the file was from CMFads.com and was a php file. I kept clicking close so It wouldn’t open or download. It appeared 3 times and after the 3rd time my virus software popped open a warning in the bottom right corner telling my some suspicious activity was noticed and that it was scanning the computer in the background.

Well at that point I got concerned because as far as I know CMFads.com has nothing to download so then I wondered if one of the blogs had something malicious going on pretending to be from CMFads.com. So I closed my browser, which is FireFox and is up to date, and decided to let the computer scan.

Now I am a fanatic about cleaning my computer files, defragging, scanning and all my software is up to date and I run Windows XP.

So after watching the movie Saw II, I went to check on my computer. Wahm! I had the blue screen of death, so to speak. I don’t remember the option it gave me but I selected it and then It went to a black screen with white lettering giving my 5 options, such as safe mode etc. No matter what option I chose my computer would appear to reboot but always came back to the black & white screen. My computer would not go any further.

Now I work from home and all my tax info, personal finances, photos and basically my life is on my laptop so at this point I got really upset and bummed. My desktop motherboard died 4 months ago and my backup drive from Seagate wouldn’t backup anymore because of a an error on the disk, so I had NO BACKUP!!

I called the Geek Squad as I live out in the boonies and there are not a lot of choices. He came to my home and checked out my computer. Good news was my laptop hard drive was A-OK and my computer was still in great working shape. What had been destroyed by this virus was my operating system boot file so Windows XP could not boot, period!

So I am lucky in that my personal data was transferred to his 320gb USB drive, which I had to purchase to get my data, then I had to reformat my laptop to factory new and upload ALL programs. So it could have been much worse but man oh man the bill was a bummer. The visit was $100 an hour, he was here 2 hours because well I had oooodles of stuff that took forever to transfer to the backup drive. And the backup drive cost $95. So total I paid $298.95 to be exact to save my personal data. ERRRRR!

Hindsight I should have fixed my backup drive ASAP because my desktop is dead. Expensive lesson!

Now the kicker is there is nothing I could have done to prevent it. My virus software attempted to fix the problem but it’s not 100% so my friendly blogger’s beware, we can get zapped and nothing can stop it.

If you don’t see me for a few days it’s because I am still getting laptop back to normal and looking to purchase a 2nd one as well.

Tootles for now and watch those viruses…….

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Tagged as: computer virus, operating system, windows xp