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Jul. 31st, 2023 07:00 amWhat a fucking week this has been.
Following that restart, I found some of my Google searches redirected to Bing. Not a big deal on its own, but I initially thought that would be an easy fix regardless, before getting wrapped up trying one thing after another. Tech support was not very helpful this time, and I eventually decided just to make Bing my new search engine.
It wasn't long, though, before I looked up what was going on and discovered it to be some sort of virus and how badly it could really affect my computer, and asked Brian et al for any possible software recommendations. He suggested I reboot Windows wholesale, and the instructions I went on to look up specified a device with at least 8GB of free space in lieu of the original installation disk.
I used my external hard drive for that purpose, and it got wiped clean. While that was mentioned not much further below, it was already 9 PM, and I must have been falling asleep without realizing, and decided just to call it a night.
So now, amongst other things, all my food icons are gone. At least I didn't lose Starbound, though, which I created on the computer.
The next morning, Friday, the Internet was down, and at that point, I considered asking Dad to drive me to the mall, where I had also placed an order for the MGRP light novels.
I also discovered my computer to start shutting itself off whenever left alone for what later turned out to be 30 minutes.
Mom called from work at one point, though, and offered to bring me herself once she'd be home early from a doctor's appointment. By the time she came home, though, things went up and running anyway, and Mom and I were able just to get down to business and look for other solutions before I reinstall Windows.
The next morning, Mom came to agree on that to be the only practical option left.
Afterwards, I hooked up my old computer, and decided to use that for the day. After reverting my external hard drive, saving everything on that PC there, and installing a program called Malwarebytes, I decided to download the two ROMs and emulators each, and during some digging around. Discovered this online program called VirusTotal, which only detected a virus each on the two RMGP downloads, both of which I went on to double-delete.
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/upload
We later went to the gym, and while Mom went into Savers first, I went to Stop & Shop to deposit a total of $25.63 in loose change. Went on back home to download five volumes of MGRP to Kindle; The Week was not going to cut it after such a miserable one for me, nor would even any of my remaining unread manga, when I had already been craving something in particular. (What I made was actually enough for only three volumes, but I forgot about having to enter a code, until I noticed nothing deducted in the first two receipts.)
Wi-fi went down again during a windstorm last night, and remained down all the way until a shift I had yesterday from 11 to 4. Kindle didn't get to sync from my computer, and it's a good thing I already had an unread sample of volume 1.
Currently, I have received reassurances of a false positive from RMGP's developer, after having complained to her on GitHub last night, and have asked the person who recommended it to me on Discord if she had experienced any issues with her computer. The latter denied any PC issues, and someone else has just had this to say:
Viruses don't commonly power down computers. Usually they have something to gain by compromising the computer, not just be annoying.
But overheating sometimes does. And we've been having a heat wave lately.
False positives are pretty common in custom software used by very few people. Game devs run into it all the time, when they release new game versions.
Because antivirus software tends to be kinda crap, and most of what they do is just use a database of known executables, and if it's not in the list then it might be flagged if any of the scanner logic thought it looked suspicious enough.
So what you do is figure out why your computer is broken. It's likely a hardware or driver issue.
In any case, at the very least, I am going to spend the next few days re-compiling everything I can think of to my current desktop, my external drive, and my laptop, and create a new installation drive from an empty device, before I look into redownloading anything. (For all I can tell definitively, that virus might have come from something I had since ruled out.)
Following that restart, I found some of my Google searches redirected to Bing. Not a big deal on its own, but I initially thought that would be an easy fix regardless, before getting wrapped up trying one thing after another. Tech support was not very helpful this time, and I eventually decided just to make Bing my new search engine.
It wasn't long, though, before I looked up what was going on and discovered it to be some sort of virus and how badly it could really affect my computer, and asked Brian et al for any possible software recommendations. He suggested I reboot Windows wholesale, and the instructions I went on to look up specified a device with at least 8GB of free space in lieu of the original installation disk.
I used my external hard drive for that purpose, and it got wiped clean. While that was mentioned not much further below, it was already 9 PM, and I must have been falling asleep without realizing, and decided just to call it a night.
So now, amongst other things, all my food icons are gone. At least I didn't lose Starbound, though, which I created on the computer.
The next morning, Friday, the Internet was down, and at that point, I considered asking Dad to drive me to the mall, where I had also placed an order for the MGRP light novels.
I also discovered my computer to start shutting itself off whenever left alone for what later turned out to be 30 minutes.
Mom called from work at one point, though, and offered to bring me herself once she'd be home early from a doctor's appointment. By the time she came home, though, things went up and running anyway, and Mom and I were able just to get down to business and look for other solutions before I reinstall Windows.
The next morning, Mom came to agree on that to be the only practical option left.
Afterwards, I hooked up my old computer, and decided to use that for the day. After reverting my external hard drive, saving everything on that PC there, and installing a program called Malwarebytes, I decided to download the two ROMs and emulators each, and during some digging around. Discovered this online program called VirusTotal, which only detected a virus each on the two RMGP downloads, both of which I went on to double-delete.
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/upload
We later went to the gym, and while Mom went into Savers first, I went to Stop & Shop to deposit a total of $25.63 in loose change. Went on back home to download five volumes of MGRP to Kindle; The Week was not going to cut it after such a miserable one for me, nor would even any of my remaining unread manga, when I had already been craving something in particular. (What I made was actually enough for only three volumes, but I forgot about having to enter a code, until I noticed nothing deducted in the first two receipts.)
Wi-fi went down again during a windstorm last night, and remained down all the way until a shift I had yesterday from 11 to 4. Kindle didn't get to sync from my computer, and it's a good thing I already had an unread sample of volume 1.
Currently, I have received reassurances of a false positive from RMGP's developer, after having complained to her on GitHub last night, and have asked the person who recommended it to me on Discord if she had experienced any issues with her computer. The latter denied any PC issues, and someone else has just had this to say:
Viruses don't commonly power down computers. Usually they have something to gain by compromising the computer, not just be annoying.
But overheating sometimes does. And we've been having a heat wave lately.
False positives are pretty common in custom software used by very few people. Game devs run into it all the time, when they release new game versions.
Because antivirus software tends to be kinda crap, and most of what they do is just use a database of known executables, and if it's not in the list then it might be flagged if any of the scanner logic thought it looked suspicious enough.
So what you do is figure out why your computer is broken. It's likely a hardware or driver issue.
In any case, at the very least, I am going to spend the next few days re-compiling everything I can think of to my current desktop, my external drive, and my laptop, and create a new installation drive from an empty device, before I look into redownloading anything. (For all I can tell definitively, that virus might have come from something I had since ruled out.)