charlemagne

For ages my laptop was haunted by spyware. It was the classic wretched spyware that sent pop-ups to my screen whenever I got onto the NET. There was everything from E-Bay to porn flitting across my screen. I tried all of the software you could think of to scan for it and remove it. Hijack, Ad-Aware, McAfee--nothng worked. I even tried reloading the operating system and AOL. That didn't work either. Finally, I bit the bullet and booted up into ersatz-DOS and formatted my hardrive. Then came the gruesome task of reloading the operating system and software, but at least the spyware was gone. Of course, nothing worked the way it was supposed to, so began the game of playing with the settings. Eventually the computer seemed to be working OKAY, OKAY, that is, until I logged into our beloved SG. When I tried to look at my friends profiles to read their blogs I got Runtime Error 6025, Pure Virtual Function Call, and everything would freeze and AOL collapsed. I searched the NET and got all kinds of useless, confusing information. I started thinking about what was different about my computer after I did all of that restore stuff. MSN Messenger kept popping up. It hadn't done that before, so I shut it off and presto! I'm back in business on SG--so far.

I've worked and played with computers for over thirty years--done everything from programming to fixing hardware--and I wasn't going to be beaten by this piece of &$#@. However, all's well that ends well, but boy I hate Microsoft!