What Were The Odds?

The last few days have really been something, not a good something but an annoying something. You all know by now that the website has been down for a few days, let’s start with my computer. I had company from Scotland for a couple of weeks at the house. It was my brother-in-law and my sister-in-law. They were going somewhere with my daughter one day and needed directions, so I went on what looked like a Google site and downloaded them. Little did I know it was a spoof site, one made to look like a legitimate site, but really there only to drop viruses on your computer. I ended up getting over 900 instances of different viruses throughout my machine. When I saw how complex the infection was I knew I couldn’t erase it manually, because it would take me forever. Keep in mind my computer was protected by Trend Micro Maximum Security and Malwarebytes, but neither program could stop the massive infection. I decided to use Spyware Hunter and let the computer run for hours while it weeded out the viruses.

While the computer was running it suddenly went off and would not start again, so I couldn’t get into boot mode to run a rescue disk. The computer is a HP laptop with an Intel I7 chip. I did everything to start it I knew about but it wouldn’t start. I went online using my backup to see if anyone else had this type of problem, but found nothing useful. The power light would blink 3 times when I tried to start it, Β but that was all. My son-in-law suggested it might be a code, but I couldn’t find anything on it. I finally took out the battery and plugged the computer in again without it and it started. The battery had blown out during the cleansing, what rotten luck. I hadn’t wanted to use Windows Restore because I had put some software on the machine I didn’t want to lose, but now I decided I had no choice and would do that, if I could get into Windows. I was able to and restored the computer to a state it was in 2 weeks before and that cleared up the machine, but that was not the end of the problems.

What really irked me was the fact I had somehow lost articles I had written in advance and a lot of my article material. No one who writes articles likes to see much of their work lost. I did have most of the software to reinstall, but I found out one important fact. If you get a new computer, which I did, you can’t restore a full system backup on a computer if it has a different operating system and at the time my backup computer was running Windows 7 and the machine which went down was running Windows 8.1. The type of backup I used was a picture of the system. It is actually not recommended as the best type of backup. It is said backing up all your data in files and backing up your software the same way and then reinstalling Windows is the best way to go.

I was feeling pretty good about things and decided to check my mail, some of which comes from the site my website is on. No mail would download. I was getting a message that my passwords were incorrect. I wondered how this could be since I had not changed any of them. Oh well I thought, I would go on to the site and put in new passwords and that is when I found I could not get onto the site to do that. I then tried to send a test file onto the site and got another password error even though it was a different password which was used for transfers. Obviously something had happened on the host site and it needed to be fixed. To make matters worse I had been locked out of the site for trying to get onto it too many times with the supposed wrong password. My host has no telephone number, but I have to admit they respond to problems very quickly when contacted. The area of the host site where trouble tickets are created does not require a password, so I opened a ticket.

It was very strange because they said they were not doing any work on the site so perhaps someone had gotten onto it and changed the passwords. As you can see I was having a really bad time. The technology department at the host site worked with me for hours and eventually the problems got fixed, but here is the killer. I have a second site and it was having the same problems so I had to go through the same thing with that. Lucky for me the same host runs it. Finally I got everything going with the exception of Microsoft Outlook my mail program. I was using it to get all my mail including mail from a Yahoo address and it wasn’t connecting to Yahoo anymore. I did some investigation and found out that Yahoo no longer allows you to get their free mail unless you go to their site, at least this was what I was told. I tried everything and there were quite a bit of suggestions, but nothing worked. One of the problems with the Internet is when you go to a site a lot of times you do not know how old it is so the suggestions made in these cases may no longer be valid.

I was just about set when lightning struck again and I hurt my leg. This didn’t affect my typing,` but who the heck wants to be uncomfortable while working. I am now using an Acer Predator desktop to type my articles and to tell you the truth I like it better than my laptop. I like the idea of being able to have a large monitor as my main screen. As one gets older the writing seems to get smaller. I am hoping that all these troubles are now behind me and I can get back to putting up articles without any interference and without the fickle finger of fate stepping into my life.