So, last week Thursday and Friday our computer came down with a case of two bad viruses which quickly turned into more. One of them was a password stealer that kept rebooting the computer whenever it felt like it. The other redirected almost all links to other pages that gave the computer more viruses while the first one overrode all of our virus software and firewalls. Lovely.

I spent fourteen hours trying to get the damn virus off. Norton couldn't find anything at all. MalwareBytes found all of it, but was unable to remove it. So, when Rob got home from work he called Microsoft Support. They said that they could remotely enter the computer and take off all viruses - even the two impossible to remove ones (the ones I was getting from the redirected links were easier to get rid of). Of course, that service would cost us a hundred bucks. What choice did we have? Luckily, it was worth the money and our computer is now virus free.

I now have two firewalls running - from Microsoft and from Norton and I upgraded my MalwareBytes to the paid version which is always active and not just when you run a scan. I also installed an ad blocker app onto Firefox since I know a lot of viruses can come in through Java ads and the like. Here's hoping it's enough and this doesn't happen again.

On Saturday we found out that Gabriel's computer was dead. When turned on, the HP logo would flash, then stop, then flash, then stop, and do this over and over until it was powered down. Rob called HP support and they said it meant that the hard drive was dead. Luckily for us, that computer was bought last June and so it was still under warranty. They mailed us a new hard drive (which arrived today) along with two discs worth of material since that new hard drive is starting out blank. Everything, including the operating system, has to be put onto it.

Tonight Rob has been able to remove the old hard drive (which we will need to mail back to HP or they'll charge us for it) and put the new one in. He's spent the past few hours installing the things from the discs, I have no idea how long that will take, but hopefully it will work and Gabriel will have his "very own computer" back and working by tomorrow.

On the bright side, he can kind of use our old Vaio (the one that needs the chip clip so that the monitor still will work properly) so he's not entirely without a computer - if he was, it would be no fun for anyone around here. Ain't Gabriel happy, ain't no one happy.

So yeah - two of our three computers borked out last weekend. The third isn't technically ours though, it's Rob's work computer and if he has problems with that he can always use the IT people at work.