The end to computer problems (hopefully)

Those would be my computer problems, not yours. And I finally had it yesterday and broke down and took it to an HP store. Two very helpful and enterprising chaps stated that they were well qualified to fix it but it would be an "unofficial" repair job. I.E. HP doesn't pay them to fix stuff. HP pays them to sell stuff. But they're experts in the HP system and they fix stuff as a way to make extra money. I decided to trust them (they earned some instant cred by diagnosing the problem right away) and although it took about 7 hours to do the job (and about $75), we're back in action.

Anyway, I must apologize to Microsoft for all the hatred that has spewed forth from my soul in anger at Windows Vista. There is no doubt that Vista deserves some of the hatred and criticism leveled, but this time (at least) the problem wasn't Vista. This doesn't excuse Microsoft from releasing a power hogging, unfinished product, but at the least, they don't share the direct blame.

No, the direct blame has to be leveled on me or some other user of my computer (of which there were 2, one of whom is not a likely culprit, the other is) because I had a virus. A truly nasty virus that had infected Norton and was causing the computer to freeze. Once they uninstalled Norton, the freezing problem cleared up right away. I don't know how the virus got on the pc. I know that I didn't install or access any files which were unknown (just Skype, google taskbar, etc) but who knows. Those virus producing bastards are wiley.

At any rate, the virus was only part of the problem. The other part was more serious in some ways. HP has a hard drive partition of about 8 gigs (on this laptop). It's intended to be used for system restore purposes. Well, at some point over the last month, I backed up the hard drive on the partition (as I was automatically directed to do, directions I followed like a lemming) and that caused two problems. One, it backed up the virus. And two, it used up all but 10 megabytes of the partition. These were particularly bad occurences. With the virus backed up, any system restore would just propel the virus back into total infection stage. And, HP's partition is not particularly clever in that to delete a backup, you have to back up the files anew and with only 10 megs of space, that was impossible.

The solution was to completely restart. The techies tried to create windows disks from my hard drive but that proved impossible. The virus worked its way into those files and would have just replicated itself on the new system. So, they reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled windows from untainted discs. Now I have to ensure that my external hard drive is not infected.

In the end, I learned two things. The internets is like a $2 whore and has the diseases to prove it. And two, never, ever use the HP backup feature for anything. Plus, if anyone ever needs some reliable HP guys to fix their computer (and install Office etc gratis) I can hook you up.