Was it generic or trojan, the black widows of the internet...??.

Lord help me, I don't know what to do.....I was cruisin along at the speed of light, my pages were flipping so fast ----- all of a sudden, the page flickered and crashed.

Does this sound familiar to any of you? Oh come on, I know it has happened at least once or twice--maybe you had to send your machine to the guru down the street....the battle rages onward through the wires as more and more people just sit at home and figure out what type of virus they can create next to send through your email, or hide in that new software you just downloaded....

may or may not help you......

Being offline for several months, I was truly excited when I finally got it together and found what I thought was the best deal for internet so as not to pay almost a hundred dollars, yup, that's what it is around this neck of the woods; for an internet connect.

Knowing what I know about these persnickety machines, I knew I was several balls short of a home run when I hooked back in....two of my most effective tools had gone and expired on me while I was offline. This is never a good thing, and it has been an up and downhill battle all week......

First of all, a lot of peoples computers go down due to lack of defragging. Every time you download a program into la machine or watch a movie online, or even sometimes load a music cd into it, it causes fragmentation....this is an extremely baaaaaddddd thing to happen as this is a major reason of crashes. Your computer comes with a "disc cleaner" but this just moves all the files around and compresses them and causes yet more fragmentation until all of a sudden, the screen goes blank and you suffer what some of you know as the black screen of death....no, it is not dead really, just needs a tuneup.

To avoid all of that, there is a program called Diskeeper which will auto defrag continuously and you never have to worry at all. This is what I use.

Some spyware, antivirus programs are not compatible at all and I got rid of Norton many years ago when I found out it was taking up mountains of disc space, saving files and adding too much to my computer, I actually lost a machine over Norton....may he rest in peace....

I now use Xoft Spyware, by Paratelogic....it has caught things in la machine that no other ware will. I also use Spysweeper and PC Tools Internet Security (best on the market)....My challenge this week was that I also have four firewalls running and do not write me and tell me I cannot do this, I have been doing this for years and have a smooth running clean machine continually......BUT......as I said about fragmentation and some programs are not compatible, my new inet connection did not want any of the above and recommended Norton and actually sent me a Norton disc with FREE subscription...I burned it in the fire outside.....recalling my lost machine and all of the information in it as well.....backup?? of course, but was misplaced somewhere ....

This internet connection installed, but would not work. Half of my tools were expired and the firewalls were locked in the expirations. After finding a generic PP trojan after a scan, I got really serious.

The installation had changed all of the settings and were ot working properly, to maintain a connect this week has been one of the biggest challenges in my life. I actually have a program called Winsock Fix, which fixes errors caused by deleting and moving registry keys, damaging your registry: during an installation of a new piece of software. Let me see, in one day, I installed the inet, it didn't work, was supposed to be hight speed...was blocked by one of my walls, had to find the wall, allow the net stuff, uninstall, reinstall.....all of which caused the machine to almost go down.....DEFRAG,,,,worked. got back online, and all of my systems started crashing......what in the world? Uninstalled again. It was the registry keys. Run the winsock....defrag.......THEN.......OMG

There has been an update wanting to install itself from Microsoft since last year....Svc pack 3....not in my machine.....It installed itself somehow and the machine went down.....That is when you do a system restore and put it back to the way it was before the crash.....and then to keep this from happening again, you disallow automatic updates. Defrag. for the crash turned your drives red.

Reinstall. remember how you got it to work, open the walls, check the connect...and finally tonight after renewing two of my tools, I am totally back in the saddle again, galloping through my world ...and lovin it. Hated to be off line for so long, but this long story has a moral.....

Make sure you keep your virus, spyware, and malaware fighters up to date, know how to get into each of their firewalls and down into their guts, for this is an easy fix instead of not knowing where to go and having to put your machine in the shop for some nerd to get paid to do what I just told you. Defrag, defrag, defrag.....keep that machine running smooth. There are more viruses created every day, just to give you a week like I had....and what is a generic PP anyhow??? Don't care, it's out of my life, actually only a low grade trojan, but low, high, in between, they all spell trouble!!!

And Have a Great Day!!!!