Dead Computer

My desktop blew up last night.

It had been running a little too hard ever since the last batch of Play Cole films (there's an animated one coming that nearly killed it). And I have a bad habit of making computers do a lot more than they were designed. I buy a desktop to check my email and I start encoding mp3s on it. I get a better desktop to handle the audio and I start editing movies on it. Computers don't like that.

Then I discovered BitTorrent. You should stay away from this. There was a BBC one-on-one interview between Ricky Gervais and Larry David that I had to see and BitTorrent was the only place to get it. I did and it worked great. Then I noticed BitTorrent had every episode of Star Trek. I went back for season 2 of Enterprise and took them down to Vegas last month. Worked great and saved the battery life so I downloaded season one of Voyager for our upcoming trip to Japan. Then I started hunting for video games. You can see the slippery slope.

Two nights ago I get a pop-up warning me of a security risk. I click it and am taken to a spam landing page. I run Norton and Ad-Aware. No viruses but Ad-Aware finds 100 pieces of spyware (it only finds 40 after porn). I erase those and another pop-up shows up. But I just erased it!

I promised to upload Tim Warner and Lara Yaz's sets from the other night and it takes me twice as long through the morass of pop-ups. I run Ad-Aware and it finds 80 new spybots. In twenty minutes!

Walker comes over to upload a dvd of his performance in Trinidad. Pulling video off a dvd is tricky, even if it's legal. So I unplug my LAN line and in the middle of the upload, more pop-ups. I'm not even connected to the internet! "Security risk", "Trojan virus", "Someone got your credit card number" and on and on with the bullshit. It takes me three hours to get Walker's video off the dvd and onto myspace, swimming upstream through ads as soon as I reconnect online. He leaves about midnight and I run one more Ad-Aware. The desktop crashes in the middle of it.

I get up this morning, unplug the internet connection and prepare to run Ad-Aware again. At this point, I'm fully aware that I may have to back up my documents and reformat. Voyager is a loss. But the desktop doesn't go on. It doesn't even go into safe mode. It keeps attempting to launch into safe mode and then reboots. And I have to leave for work.

Anyone heard of a new virus going around? One that takes over your Microsoft alerts and changes your IE home page? One that warns your computer is restarting when it isn't? And takes you to their landing page even if you click 'cancel' or the 'x'? (By the way, the landing page is for a product called 'antispy', an anti-virus system. It's like paying protection money. "You don't like us destroying your system? Buy our product to make it stop.") Anybody know how to deal with it? Cause Microsoft, Norton and Ad-Aware have no idea.

I need some advice. Brian, you've reformatted your SONY VAIO before. Bill, you're an IT genius. Guy I've never met before that found my blog on google? You're smarter than me. Leave a comment. I appreciate the help.