In the wee small hours of the morning on Monday, I somehow managed to find a very unfriendly blog -- one that left a trojan on my laptop. Thankfully, my anti-virus software caught it quickly; unfortunately, it wasn't quick enough to prevent the trojan from making a change to the computer's registry so that about an hour later, a message pops up on my screen alerting me to the fact that another computer, with the same name as mine, has joined our household network. Thinking it was some kind of mistake, I hesitated a minute before figuring out that it may have something to do with the trojan.


I launched AdAware just in case there was some kind of malware on the machine and kept on working on my Monday Musings post. All of a sudden, I start hearing Chinese coming from my iPhone speaker which is always hooked up to the laptop. Freaking out completely now, I knew there was a problem as I began to connect the dots. . .there was a phantom hacker /user / a$$hole on our network, with access to my computer and clearly enjoying him/herself!

Try as I might, I couldn't get the registry change fixed and ended up having to reinstall Windows yesterday. I've never done it before, so that was quite an adventure in and of itself. Once I got all the drivers and whatnot reinstalled, everything worked fine except that I couldn't access the internet network. Thanks to my cousin, whose Microsoft certification comes in really handy, the problem was diagnosed by phone and fixed in no time. But that was at 7:30 last night!

I am still trying to get everything reinstalled on my computer so that I can get caught up with the work I was supposed to have done for the business on Monday. I hope to have that done sometime tonight, and then I will return to my regularly scheduled blogging.