To be fair, I have been living on the edge using an old Windows 7 system with no power back up or as it turns out, no hired protecting software like WebRoot, Malwarebytes, etc., protecting me from all the slimy, evil, pervasive heebie jeebies that are always looking for a rube like me to take advantage of.
This time it was the ransomware assholes who snagged me. A lack of attention combined with a knee jerk panic punch of absolutely the wrong icon and they had me hooked and in the net. I contacted the number at the top of the screen and it turns out my computer was useless if I didn't ante up serious jingle to have them unlock the gates.
I performed the hard shut down before I pulled out a credit card. I called my computer guy and he fixed me up. Problem was he had a back log of work. I would have to wait my turn. Call me next week.
Day before yesterday I picked it up and let it sit unconnected while I did the best I could to ignore it. Finally the itch to write and yeah, reconnect on Facebook, overwhelmed my current lethargy and I spent most of today getting to the point you see in the picture. It is never just reconnecting. I had 10 years of dust bunnies built up behind the old computer. I cleaned all surfaces, relocated outlet strips and reorganized a couple of drawers in the desk.
The typical and predicted failure to stick to a plan very well, an hour job turned into a six hour endurance event. ..........
My life has been a series of chores that appeared to be simple , but more often than not, seldom were.
Just a "you might be interested".........
I picked up the malevolent scourge while on Facebook. Not blaming them: I was an idiot and deserved what happened. Reminded me to not get complacent, no matter where I travel on the Internet.
Keep it 'tween the ditches ..............................
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I found a group I had not heard of. Don't know any of their history. But their covers are excellent. Here is Broken Peach and their rendition of "Tainted Love", PLUS, their fine cover of "Personal Jesus". You're welcome.
Volume up to WOW is advised. Enjoy.
3 comments:
Glad you are up and running again. Good you were dealing with an old system that needed replacing. Was the dealer able to salvage the contents of your HD? So far I have never had ransomware but have clicked on the wrong icon a couple times and acquired a popup fake warning about viruses. Not via Chrome but that damn MS browser Edge which your blog opened into. It is built in and no way to get rid of it. Getting rid of the popup was easy. I'm using McAffee Antivirus plus Windows Defender. It gives me a good feeling but no idea how effective it is.
Merry Christmas
Blog Fodder - I already had a new/used Dell tower I was supposed to replace the old system with over a year ago. a beefier memory card and the HDD hard drive was replaced by a much faster and supposedly more reliable SSD hard drive.
The big question was as you asked; was my computer guy able to transfer all those years of accumulated digital garbage to the new 'puter? Not only did he copy and transfer everything on the old Windows system, he cleaned up that old computer so that it is still useable.
Now I have another spare. I love have spares of almost anything. They come in handy.
Good safety measure about things like that -- to use flash drive installed OS.
Or... to make it easier... some virtualization software (WM Ware or etc), and some Linux/Chrome for web-serfing inside it.
And... you'd be able to do pretty much anything and everything (except giving your credit card number and all... but that is, dangerous in real life too). Like pushing whatever icon you like.
Well... there is possibility of "jail-break" out of virtualization... but that is not that popular, yet.
As well as danger made to hardware itself, not heard for a long time too.
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