Viruses, meh

Well, sometime over the weekend my laptop became infected with the AV2009 virus/trogan/rogueware/scareware annoyance. Everything I've done to find and eliminate it's components has driven me up the wall the last few days, if my software wasn't scattered betwen so many storage spots, i'd just format my hard drive and start over (been actually wanting to do that since I got this thing). If you don't know what it does, it's scareware really, claims your computer is infected (which it isn't lying since it itself is what's infecting your machine) with official looking pop up alerts in your tool bar every couple minutes (which is the annoying part) which takes you to a bogus website to download Anti-Virus 2009 (updated av2008 virus). AV 2009 is worthless, and in fact loads more trogans onto your machine, but they still charge your CC fee's for software you didn't order and recurring fee's etc in a scam to take as much money as they can. I had to tweak my settings on Zone Alarms Security Suite for it to finally pick up part of the problems, ordinarily I would recommend them to people as a superior product over Norton's or McAffee but the last couple years, they've become just as much a resource hog as the other two. Oh joy, now it seems i'm stuck using IE7, Safari isn't even loading. Guess I'll try a roll back since i was fiddling with some settings earlier.

Already thinking of replacing this laptop, only 2 years old but given it's my primary source of entertainment when I'm away from home (which is near constant) it's starting to have issues. Could be just me thou, i test a lot of different software but it doesn't totally go away when you uninstall it (still looking for a good reliable registery cleaner) but I know that every 2 years computer power roughly doubles as well as prices come down.

Can't believe how reassuring it is to be on a ship and feeling it heave slightly beneath your feet slightly even along side the pier. I'll be glad to be out of the ship yard, cast off all lines and hear the announcement "last line, shift colors" as break free from our tether to the land and all the problems associated with it. I'll try to hold that thought, that's almost a post in and of itself.

Giving up trying to fix the problems tonight, think I'll just veg out and watch a movie, i'd read a book but i've read so many in the past few months that i have a hard time keeping plot lines straight in my head.