Saturday I got up and was chatting on line and cruising around a few news sites when I started getting spammed left and right... popups everywhere, crap trying to download... so I'm thinking this is not good. HA! Was that an understatement. By the time I got the virus protection and spyware software updated (this laptop hasn't been connected the internet in almost a year) I had over 70 hits of spy/malware. Some things loaded on without me knowing and wouldn't even come off in the remove/add software area of Windows. Finally got those stipped out and the laptop is fried... I mean just shredded to hell. It keeps telling me the administrator has restricted certain activities. And all I can think when I read that is I'm the fraking administrator!!!!! GRRRRRR! The entire control panel is gone... just gone, doesn't exist any more as far as I can tell. It won't even let me change the time or date. It won't show images (although it *can*, it just won't). It is running about at 1/1000th of the speed it was before. And accessing the internet? Ha! In my dreams. So I spent all weekend trying to reinstall and patch and get the damn thing up and running with no luck. Koschka has a friend who's a computer tech guy who is going to call and try to talk me through some things on Friday. If that doesn't work, I'll take the laptop with me when I go back to Koschka's in a few weeks for her birthday and let him work on it there.
So long story short, I wasted my entire weekend trying to fix my stupid laptop and ended up worse than I started.
Sigh.
How does something so good turn to crap so fast?