Wednesday, in an absent-minded moment, I noticed a notification pop up out of my task bar.  Something about low memory.  I’ve seen these before, and really, after 2 years of downloading pictures, music, and other files, a low memory notification wasn’t all too surprising. I clicked to close it out.

Except as soon as I clicked, another notification opened up.  I still didn’t really look at it, but it said something about something failing.  My options were to retry or cancel.  I clicked cancel.  Suddenly my computer started to shut down and restart.  I still wasn’t alarmed.  Sometimes my computer just does this to install updates or whatever.  But when it restarted, the screen was black, I had some sort of anti-virus scanning program (not the one we use) saying it was scanning for fatal errors, and my “all programs” folder was empty and my desktop and task bar icons were gone, PANIC.  Then the fake scanning program said I needed to upgrade my protection in order to get rid of the virus.  A whole evil virus concoction to get my credit card info.

This is a bad virus.  It spread through the computer FAST. It attempted to send our personal information to an outside system (our firewall blocked hundreds of attempts).  It was innocent enough looking that I didn’t think twice when clicking. And it wiped out our hard drive.

Luckily we back up our files every so often, and we didn’t lose much, but talk about a hassle.  And I had no computer for more than 24 hours. 

On the plus side, no computer meant I actually got some stuff done.  We bought our Christmas tree on Monday in the snow at Lowe’s.  Last night I finally finished decorating it! I am in need of a tree topper though.  Now if I could just get around to finishing my gingerbread house, we’d be in business! (My photo editing software isn’t installed yet, so these are unedited.  I was also having a hard time with the wordpress picture uploading thing, so these are all out of order).

Lowe's Christmas Tree Farm