outsourced

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

my holidays were of the usual sort: eating and drinking TONS with the fam, gift exchange, etc. however, since nothing good ever happens without the bad, of course i also had a technical nightmare of a holiday.

on Christmas Eve, as relatives were arriving for a hotpot lunch, my "trusty" HP Pavilion ze2000 was attacked by a virus. all of a sudden my screen went bonkers and the wallpaper changed from an adorable baby picture of my friend SFM to the words "you're computer is infected", my AVG anti-virus program was going nuts stating i had a million infections, and, although i could get on-line, i couldn't access any websites but instead was redirected to advertisements and other sites every time i clicked a link. it was a nightmare.

in this day and age, a person's computer is akin to their cellphone or iPod. it's something i've learned to not live without-ok, that's false. i could live without it, but would i want to? i doubt it. i brought my laptop to PC Warehouse to be looked at ASAP and luckily for me it was open on Christmas Eve. the guy at PC Warehouse could qualify for being in My Five recently. only in August i brought my comp to be completely re-installed back to factory default settings and then i've probably seem him at least 3-4 more times since them. the most recent visit my comp had been attacked by a virus and had to be cleaned for 2-3 days. and that cost upwards of $75-$100. suffice it to say that although PD is a great guy, i really wish i wasn't seeing him so often.

i prob spent a good hour and a half sitting there while PD manually went through deleting various trojan horses (yes, i know the term but what exactly are they i have no idea, just that they're bad news). i brought it home, relieved the crisis was over. or so i thought. INCORRECT. those nasty viruses were still there, just changing and evolving to evade capture and deletion! that was the end of my laptop for the Christmas holiday since i had to drop it off to be fixed on Saturday and will not see it again until Monday at the earliest.

when did computer use and surfing the Internet become so hazardous? according to PD, some site i went on must've had the virus and it attached itself to my computer just waiting for me to click it's link. and those tricky little buggers make themselves look all official mimicking the Windows insignia and claiming to protection programs (and no, i did NOT click any of them even if it did say that-i'm not completely stupid). what irks me is to get a virus on my comp without even doing anything: yes, i may have been on a site with a virus embedded or attached to it, waiting to pounce, but i didn't click anything that was remotely any advertisement or outside link. so how did it get into my comp? it'll always be a mystery. i remember the days when i was even more reckless with my Internet use, downloading this and that, clicking every link a friend sent to me, without ever seeing a virus enter my comp. now, i go on 1 harmless site and my whole computer's down for the count.

i also spent 141 minutes on the phone talking to Comcast and Linksys about our spotty wireless internet connection. what a nightmare. 1st it was Comcast to make sure the connection was good (which it was) and then it was Linksys phone support for our faulty wireless router. it was clearly outsourced tech support, but my technician, Mary, was very helpful and spoke english with a Canadian accent (which is ironic since she was clearly Indian-i knew this from her side conversations). however, i was seriously skeptical and pissed off when Linksys told me that i had to pay to get phone support!! what a rip! and so i handed the phone to my mom and let her rip them a new one before i ponied up and just let them sucker me (what else was i supposed to do? if i could've fixed it myself, i would've already).

it's times like these that i wish i was more tech savvy.