The other day my laptop got “wormed” while I took down my firewall to do some software patches. I had forgotten to disconnect from the Internet, and after 30 mins of patching, my computer started acting weird. Before I knew it, a gazillion pop-up windows materialized on my desktop, and the computer became non-responsive, even after reboots. This is the one of the worst things that can happen to a computer literate user. I got hacked. This is what I get for not upgrading my copy of IE 6.0.

Sadly enough, the mirrored drive on my hard drive was not accessible (boot sector was hijacked), and I did not have a second computer to link up my laptop drive to recover some files. I spent the next 3 hours installing a non-IBM version of Windows XP and hunting Thinkpad drivers online. In the process of fiddling around, I discovered that my USB ports were blown–typical USB header on the laptop gets pushed back into the motherboard after long-term use. One of the capacitors were oozing as well.

Hardware and software failure almost inevitably means a new computer. What will my next computer be? Will it be a Mac? In the meantime, my computer is still functional, albeit in a limited form.

computing computing, rant