A nasty virus has been hanging around here all weekend. This time it’s on my computer and not in my system (touch wood).

I couldn’t even logon to my computer. I had a mild panic when I realised that my backing up strategy is nowhere near good enough. I thought through all the things (mainly photos) that I would lose if I had to reformat.

Luckily I think I’ve avoided that and have a working computer again.

I don’t know that all the spyware/adware/trojans or whatever you want to call them have left my computer but I’m well on the way.

I borrowed my sister’s laptop to do some research which was really handy as my IT support days are long gone. I found a helpful website – the Spyware forum and have followed their recommendations. I’d always assumed that with my virus and firewall protection I would be covered but obviously not.

I’ve also bought an external hard drive which now contains a backup of all my data. I breathed a sigh of relief when I finished the transfer to it.

There’s also been lots of spam comments coming through here so I’ve installed the Extended Comments Options plugin so that after 30 days nobody can comment. I’d had something like 700 comments on one particular post which skewed my popular post stats. I’ll shortly go in and see what I can do there.

Hopefully normal programming will shortly resume here.