Oh, crap

Well, I would have been much better off spending the night at the new house. That way I would still have a functioning main computer.

I was doing some fairly typical late-night internet woolgathering, going from this site to that, doing searches based on ideas that hit me out of the blue. In the end I wound up on the "official" site for Andrea Thompson, who played Talia Winters on Babylon 5. For some reason her bio ends in 2003. While I was there I saw an .exe program suddenly pop up as an active window.

STOP STOP STOP STOP! I thought.

I tried to shut it down manually; I couldn't. Suddenly my anti-Virus software popped up a "Threat Detected!" window. Several of them. I immediately backed off and let the anti-Virus program do its thing. Then I cleared my cache, shut down the open Windows, and ran my anti-Spyware program. It detected a DNS Redirect Trojan and recommended that it be quarantined. I deleted it instead.

In hindsight, that may have been a mistake.

Things started to go bad from there. My anti-Virus icon began to flicker; opening it showed that it was now requesting several critical updates - yet it was not responding to any inputs. I also couldn't run an anti-Virus scan at this point. All I could do was shut down.

The computer won't come up again.

Oh, it goes through the motions; it starts up, and starts Windows XP. But when it gets to the place where there should be a "Welcome" screen, it instead displays a black screen with some flickering white rectangles on the left side.

At a guess I would say the video driver has been corrupted. Or maybe the video card has been fried. None of this, I imagine, is simply a coincidence, and it all must be related to the attack I witnessed.

I'm a big boy now. I have a job, I'm earning a paycheck once again. I can't keep falling back on the charity of my friends, especially the friend who provided me with these computers free of charge and then repaired the main computer once already. I'm going to make inquiries as to what it will cost to get this repaired, at the two big box chains locally represented as well as at the local computer maker who has been recommended to me.

Maybe the computer is fried beyond repair. If that is the case - well, I have this wireless laptop as a backup, and as I have said, I'm earning a paycheck now. If I have to, I'll bite the bullet and buy a new PC.