So, as none of you know...
Last night I was playing on the computer, I downloaded a game from the internet and some how it had a Trojan virus attached to it. My virus protection was out of date, (I couldn't afford it at that point in time) and had NO way to stop the virus.
It happen last night (Thursday at midnight). So of course my aderenaline pumped and I went insane. It all was crashing down on me at once. My computer was installing things I had never heard of, I was shaking and crying. Most of all I had no way to get any help from anyone online.
I called Geek Support and the lady offered to take the virus off for $165 online, $200 in the store and $220 if they came to my home. I had NO money for any of this. I was devestated. I told her I had no choice but to talk to my grandmother in the morning and see what she wanted me to do. I shut my laptop down around 1:30 and laid in bed until almost 4 before I drifted off to sleep.
I woke up at 7:30, stressing and freaking out. Now that I think about it, I can't remember anything about when I woke up. I'm not sure what was a dream and what wasn't. :( But I crawled back in bed and fell asleep (not well) for about another hour before I was awoken by my aunt.
After talking to a friend of my family, I called Qwest (our ISP) and tried to get them to remove the virus by tapping into the internet. They couldn't do it (by this time I was so frazzled I just wanted someone who could) so they gave me the number for Dell and told me to contact them. I called Dell and they gave me 3 options. 1. I could pay and have the virus removed from my computer, 2. I could restore my system to the factory settings and lose all my data 3. Rebuild my system completely and have nothing on it.
After talking with the guy, I decided to back up my pictures (because they are the most important) onto cd's and just lose the rest of my data (which I knew I could get back in time) and restore my system to the factory settings.
I lost my entire Itunes library, (thankfully its on my ipod now, I'm just gonna have to download everything again), all my Sims 2 games (thankfully I have all the discs and registration codes) and all the games I bought offline (hopefully I have their codes, if not its wasted money at this point.). I saved my pictures onto a cd, (which I am going to start doing after I bring ANY picture onto my computer to make sure I have a safe back up.) and we were going to put my itunes onto my ipod and transfer all the files, but I was scared the virus would attach itself to one of those files and claim the life of my computer a second time. Or even worse get onto my ipod and there was NO stopping any of it. So I left my Itunes and just am praying my files on my cd's aren't infected.
It has been such a long day and all on 4 hours of sleep. I'm gonna head to bed now, take care and thanks for reading.
*hugs* Ashlee
