I feel like a complete idiot. I have always preached to the world, "Use an anti-virus solution, even if you don't do much on the computer." Well, now I can pridefully call myself a hypocrite.

I rarely use my laptop, and it just sits there on the charger for days. About the only time I'll fire it up is when I want to sit on the porch and work, or I am traveling and need to be able to work while I'm away. One such example was this weekend; I came to my parents' and needed to be able to follow up on a few things.

My Dad had told me about something weird he's been seeing on his computer. He said that it would be working just fine, then reboot for no reason. I told him it was probably a virus, and that I would take a look at it while I was here. When it happened to him last night, he told me, so I fired up VNC and logged into his computer from upstairs. Almost as soon as I did, my laptop started getting all kinds of popups, fake blue screens, the task manager was disabled, and all kinds of other stupid crap. Why? Because I didn't install an anti-virus on it.

I set it aside for a couple hours, because I was so frustrated, but I got it back out after that and tried to clean it up. The first thing I ran into was resource consumption. Since the task manager was disabled though, I had to do all my work at the shell, using the tasklist and taskkill commands. After I finally got all the rogue processes killed off, I was able to get AVG installed, but then the resources were sapped up again. I gave the computer a hard power cycle, and AVG fired up when Windows came back up. It found several DLL files that it identified as "threats", so I told it just to nuke 'em.

Finally I was able to start a full system scan, but it was taking so long that I just went to bed. When I woke up this morning though, the power was off and the charging indicator was flashing orange. According to the owner's manual for the laptop, this means that the batter was low. It makes no sense though, because it's not even trying to charge. That aside, I was able to get back into Windows, but everything is still a wreck. Luckily I have nothing of major importance on here, so I'll be doing a full OS reload tonight. I may give up and put Ubuntu back on, but we shall see...