A Year of Gratitude #16

 

A Year of Gratitude #16: My Dad

I am so incredibly grateful for my dad all of the time, but especially after his help yesterday and today with my computer "situation."

I'm not sure what caused it, as I am VERY careful with what I click and open on my computer. However, I was in the middle of working on something and suddenly my Windows 7 Security Center popped up and said I had some problems and my system was in danger of trojans, worms, malware, spyware, and other nasty things. 

I don't use the Windows 7 Security... I use a program called CA and so I dismissed the popups. But then they were happening every second or so that I'd close it... and so I went to see what the heck was going on. It said I needed to register and pay $60 to delete the problems-- RED FLAG!!!

So I closed the windows and opened my CA scan and had it start a scan and then I immediately called my dad (Steve was already in bed and would have just bitched at me and then said he'd deal with it after work the following day-- today-- and I didn't want to wait that long). My dad calmly walked me through the process of removing things that shouldn't have been there, and spent over an hour on the phone with me.

Through his guidance, I was able to pretty much find the nasty bug (it was in Russian on my Task Manager processes). I became familiar with parts of my computer that I had never seen/used before. :-)

I was then able to download a program called Malwarebyte and it I did a full scan. After an hour of waiting... I headed to bed and decided to work on it in the morning.

Fast-forward to this morning... I was able to see that it found 11 suspicious items and had quarantined them. My dad said to run it again with the quick scan and do it as many times as necessary for it to have zero items. Luckily for me, one time was enough. 

Then I downloaded a program called Super Anti Spyware and it found over 900 items!!

 

CRAZY right?!?!?!

I was able to get the number to zero and then after I talked to my dad tonight, he sent me another program, this one was called ATF Cleaner and it removed stuff and so did another one called CCleaner.

My computer is cleaner than it's ever been!! 

I'm so grateful that I have a person that I can call when things like this happen. Steve would NOT have known what to do... he would have ended up calling my dad for help. 

I have friends who have had the same issue and they had to send their computer out for repair. Thankfully, my dad does this for a living and not only was he not surprised by what I was reporting, but he knew what to do to get it to stop. He was calm and confident and knew exactly what programs I needed to run in order to get everything back on track.

I'm so thankful for his brains and experience!!!