[Shrek] Reformat

This is not what I intended my next post to be about.

This was supposed to be about last weekend's get together with friends John and Kile from Virginia, segueing into a Labor Day get together with Ray Conrad, and then finally mentioning...well, I'll leave that for when I make the post, probably Wednesday.

But what happened instead was I needed to reformat my computer after being hit with a Trojan Horse.

I'm not 100% sure how my computer became infected by it because my machine is buttoned up pretty tightly, but after about five days of fighting it I became 100% sure I was losing the battle.

The final straw was when, ironically enough, I was talking to Ray after having dinner with John and Kile last Sunday night. He had left a message on our machine confirming our potential Labor Day reunion (well, technically the weekend after), and as I returned his call my firewall was turned off by the infection while I watched. I decided to quickly remove my PC from my network.

At that point I went from trying to snipe at it file by file to deciding to use the nuclear weapon of wiping the hard drive totally clean. But even in making that decision, I still faced a small hurdle. My CD drive was broken, and had been for some time. I'd tell you how long it had been broken, but I don't recall. It was long enough for Ray to have offered to fix it; not the last time he was up in Worcester, but the time previous.

Yeah, that long.

Monday morning the first thing I did was pull the old one out to make sure I was competent enough to put a new one in. After seeing how easy the removal was I was already shaking my head about not doing this earlier.

So at 8:30am, Fiona and I went off to the Circuit City at The Shoppes at Blackstone Valley in Millbury, Mass. We arrived just before 9am to find out--SURPRISE!!!--Circuit City opens at 10am. We thought it was odd that it opened so late, but as we hadn't had breakfast we decided to head over to the McDonald's on Rt20 at the Millbury/Worcester line to grab a cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich.

As we drive up to the intersection just before the McDonald's we find out--SURPRISE!!!--that particular McDonald's is under renovations and closed. We both just looked at each other and started to laugh. So much for a quick, painless trip.

We ended up going to the Golden Arches across from the newly rebuilt Auburn High School, where we know some folks from our weekly stop there Thursday evenings after bowling. Of course, despite many of them usually working the occasional morning shift none of them are working that particular morning.

After we ate and returned to Circuit City, where we were helped by two really great employees that answered all my silly questions, including one that said the replacement was going to be a very easy thing. He was right, it was very easy. So easy I am still kicking myself for not fixing it earlier. That fact I have since used it very little not withstanding.

As I had already saved all the files/pictures I wanted, all I needed to do was begin the reformat process. Having done this several times on older computers, and on other people's machines when they had issues, I knew that it is seldom a pain-free process. But with a little patience it usually all works out in the end.

And so it did, but as I'm not really that patient a person there was some cursing involved before it all worked out fine. Of course, even when things do work out fine there is usually some cursing, so I guess nothing truly out of the ordinary happened.

Now come the painfully slow process of downloading all the Window's updates and various programs I had installed before nuking the hard drive. I didn't realize how many I had until earlier this week when I figured I was less than a third done recapturing all that info. Five days later, I'm still only two thirds done.

And--SURPRISE!!!--there has been more cursing involved.