I have shocking news to report.Mildred is dying!
She has for months now been experiencing symptoms of some unknown ailment which has affect graphics display, especially during high CPU or memory usages. Purple and green dots stretching across the screen. At first I only noticed it when using Firefox to access graphically-rich sites. Then it infected my games. First Peggle and then gosh-forbid, my precious Civilization.
Around the same time I noticed a dramatic drop in the speed of my dear Mildred, especially in terms of Internet speed.
Lately it had progressively worsened to where pages would seem to take a dial-up speed to loading and even offline processes such as right-clicking to bring up options would take a couple of seconds...an eternity in our super-fast electronic world.
Just today though, Mildred had what would be best categorized as an "attack".
While I was innocently cruising a variety of Internet gay porno sites (nothing unusual in that) I experienced a browser failure (using IE 7 since Firefox is more prone to the purple and green dot problem). When I tried to re initiate the browser, I suddenly got pop-ups and a change to my desktop background warning me of viruses on my computer.
I knew immediately that Mildred had fallen victim to a serious malware/spyware attack.
Sure enough, it's the System Security malware and though I've found lots of help via web searches, all, so far, seem to also indicate that only by paying for the service could you be protected.
The above screen shot is of my scan using the now Symantec-owned and trusted PC Tools Malware Doctor to scan and eradicate the infection.But, like the fuckheads who made this Trojan in the first place, they demand payment to help me. Otherwise, I'm, left to fend for myself.
Assholes! Why is it that we have to pay to remove malevolent software that the industry inspired to create in the first place? Isn't this like paying the local gangster "protection" money against "misfortune" when really you're just paying the mob to avoid you in their regular raids and robberies? How legal is that?
So I sit here at my desk, searching for cures for my poor child Mildred. At work I told my friends that it felt that my baby was sick. They laughed like I was joking, but really, if Mildred is ill...so am I.
My preference, for both it's simplicity and thoroughness would be to just reformat the drive and reinstall everything. Though tedious, it's the most sure way to rid a computer of malware and free up years of cluttered files and registry edits to make the computer run like a young and vibrant gazelle. But, despite scouring the house a few times now, I can't find the OS disk. Without this I'm screwed. I have to fix Mildred by performing precision operation. Otherwise, I'd have to buy a whole new OS (like Vista) retail. I could afford it, but I was hoping to hold of on the computer budget category impacting in a big way for a few more months 'till I may spring for a brand new system altogether.
Well, my patient is currently experiencing a lull from the constant nuisance pop up thanks to some advice from one helpful website, but I gotta get back to my delicate operation to remove every fragment of this virus from my darling.
'Cause if Mildred dies, before I can afford an immediate successor...well, I just don't know what I would do!