Stormbringer's Thunder

Buona sera. I haven't been thundering here much lately, and now it's time to make up for it. Pay attention, willya? This is important, and I don't care what your political leanings are, we can sort that out later. I was sent a virus today. A virus will stop all of your uncluttering and productivity efforts right in their tracks. This one arrived at one of my throw-away accounts. That got my attention because I do not use that account for anything serious. My main indication that this was something to be on guard against was that Thunderbird 3 told me, "Hey, this looks like spam!" Click on the picture to see it enlarged ( better yet, use Firefox, right-click, open link in new tab ). Also, it had a Zipped file attachment (bottom left). Alarm bells are going off in my head. Now, I understand that most of my readers are careful, but some things are worth saying over and over anyway: Never open an attachment from a stranger! The attachment is the virus. That's wha...

Edited content for clarity on Tuesday, November 24, 2009. Buon giorno. Yes, I think my title is funny. This past weekend was an emotional, mental and physical roller coaster. It was time to reformat my hard drive. Dump the scraps of leftover software and things I really do not need, reload it with stuff that I know is better and go at it with my increased knowledge. Reformatting has been a source of bad news for me for a long time, mainly from trying to get the computer to resemble what I had before. I have no problem helping someone else with it, but for me, I get anxiety attacks based on experiences with my first Windows computer (HP does this to people). It happened again. First, I could not get anything to show up on my monitor. After checking some things on Nicky's computer, I decided to reformat it again. Still nothing, just a flashing cursor in the upper left corner. I looked up some more "solutions" online and tried them. No dice. I connected with a Hewle...