Why I Want a Mac - PC Nightmares

I'm not sure how many people realize this, but Macs actually have very few problems with viruses. They can get infected, but usually don't. Every single time I come in contact with yet another malicious attack on my computer and have to reformat to compensate, I wish desperately that I owned a Mac. Hours of my life are wasted on this crap. It would be worth the extra money to have a decent computer, except that I don't have it right now. One day...

I just reformatted a couple of months ago, if that, but somehow managed to get myself attacked once again. I mean, when you use a PC it's bound to happen, so most of the time you just live with it. Most people have a few viruses on their systems without even knowing it, and the system seems to hum along just fine. Quite often nothing bad happens. Then you get the really nasty ones that completely take over everything. I might as well tell you about the one I just got rid of, because it was a terror.

It started out with not letting me download things. I was building the website for The Kovacs Literary Perspective, and I needed to generate a favicon (that small little graphic that appears on tabs beside the name of the page you're viewing - not all sites have them, but they look nice if they're there). I went to an icon generating site and kept downloading the favicon I'd created, but it was not appearing in my download folder. I thought it was the website at first.

It wasn't until I tried to log into my blog to respond to a comment that things started to get serious. Google was telling me I hadn't enabled cookies, which I knew I had, but I checked it anyway. I even cleared my cache and cookies, along with my entire browsing history. I had just set up the YouTube channel for our new show, and suddenly I couldn't log in anywhere on Google, using any log-in name at all. I thought Google was the issue, because they've had those problems in the past. So I figured they'd done some updating and there was a conflict with Firefox.

When I went on to Wikimedia Commons to upload some pictures for a Wikipedia page I'm updating, I kept getting booted out. That's when I thought it might actually be Firefox and not Google. I let it be for a while, but eventually got frustrated, so I caved and installed Google Chrome. However, I had to do it through Outlook's browser (yes, there's a browser in there, believe it or not) in order to download anything. I guess the virus caught on, however, because that was the last thing I was able to download through there.

Once Chrome was running I got an error message that they had revoked their own security certificate, which really ticked me off. At this point I still thought Google might be the issue, despite the Wikimedia Commons thing. I thought I had an anti-virus program running on my computer, but it turns out I had killed it the last time I had done a system restore. Oops. My bad. A friend suggested that it was a virus, and then another one made the same suggestion, but by that point I'd already caved to the inevitable. I was infected and I knew it, and the only sure cure was to reformat.

Worst of all it looks as though the website I built has some issues, so I'm going to have to have it fried by the hosting company. In the meantime I have to build a new one. It's a good thing the planning stages are done and it's relatively easy to deal with it. I should be able to have the new site up in a few hours. Thankfully the new site I've been building for the original show, The Kovacs Perspective, had been saved as a WinRAR file a long time ago, so I have it ready to go with only a few small additions to make. They were additions I was planning to re-do anyway, so nothing was lost there at all.

Well, now that I'm back online, and everyone is updated on my whining and woes, I really need to get back to installing all the software I use on a daily basis. This time I'm setting my own stupid restore point, and hopefully it doesn't disappear on me again. Of course, the first thing I did was activate my anti-virus software, and I've been updating it as I write this. I'm a little sick of reformatting at this point. I use so many programs on my computer that having to reinstall them all is a giant pain. Never mind configuring the seven e-mail addresses that I suddenly have now (soon to be ten or twelve), and synching up my calendar - thankfully my BlackBerry has a copy of that part.

Before I install a single program, however, no matter how safe it's purported to be, my anti-virus needs to be up-to-par. I'm not going through this again for at least another six months. If it gets to the point where I have to, I'm chucking this computer and selling myself on the streets for a Mac!