I am not PC savvy.

Although I really wish I was considering the recent conditions of my laptop during the past few weeks. In a nutshell, like the naive and careless owner of this Gateway laptop that I am, I had let my computer become super-duper-foot-shoved-up-ass infected with all sorts of nasty pests. There was definitely some adware lurking here and there, as I continued to be bombarded with sudden popups on Internet Explorer while browsing on Firefox. I had of course come to the conclusion that uninstalling IE from the system would do the trick, but surely enough, I was not correct. Furthermore, I kept on getting these error messages that would not go away along with Windows disallowing me from turning on my automatic updates.

Thus I had set out to download any anti-virus program I could find to quickly scan my computer to retrieve my free and undisturbed use of my computer. I first went with Norton's, I'm not sure exactly why I had went with that choice in the first place, but I went ahead and downloaded and scanned the system as soon as it was installed. 25 hours later, the results show 15 threats and over 400 infections. I'm not too keen on what that means precisely, but I know enough to know that that's not so good. Did it fix the problem? Nope. And what's worse is (and this is the worst) I later find out my browser is failing to load all the biggie (and super vital) websites - Hotmail, Google, Blogger (explaining the gap between updates), Livejournal, Yahoo!, you name it. This is where I somewhat began to panic because I depend on Google a HUGE amount as a visual art student. It was during this time that I had to use HotBot for a search engine and my boyfriend's PC to check my email. So after the failure of Norton, I went and downloaded AVG, avast!, and AntiVir, yeah, all three of them, as one after another failed to remove the one pest that banned me from using Google. It was one of the three that finally did it, and alas, here I am.

Getting my laptop infected was a scary thing - I didn't want to turn to getting it reformatted again as I did last summer, with my mom finding out and getting angry with me for downloading so much crap (which is of course true). And not being able to use Google would have been a somewhat life-altering situation when the fall semester rolls along, as I would have been forced to retort to staying in the studio late to use the mac lab in there for my googling luxuries. I love that studio, but I would rather not spend any more time than I have to in a place located in the middle of hobo town. Not something I looked forward to.