Crash!

On Tuesday I had the shock of my life, my computer crashed. Muscles downloaded a program on my laptop and I guess my anti-virus program had expired (oops my bad), and there was some Trojan virus attached to the software he downloaded. And kaboom (well it didn't make that sound) but that was more like the sound my heart made when Muscles broke the news to me. My computer was going berserk!

I remained calm. For 5 minutes. Then I lost all sensibilities and started pacing my apartment muttering not so nice words under my breath, hoping Muscles could work magic and restore it without losing anything. I was never angry at him. But I was freaking out. I am so computer illiterate I just had no idea what was happening.

But there was no way to get rid of the virus through some of the tricks he tried. Luckily Muscles is somewhat of a computer genius. He built his own computer from scratch, so I had all my hopes on him. I have so many pictures, and videos downloaded. I don't have a television so I download shows from home, my computer is my gateway to home and to life outside of India, I would be lost without it.

Muscles informed me that there is good news and bad news. The good news is that he can fix the computer, bad news is, he'll have to completely reformat it and remove EVERYTHING from the hard drive to get rid of the virus. But, he has one of those 80gb IPOD and so he could save my itunes folder (which holds 800 songs), all my pictures and the videos I had downloaded which was about 15gb of data. It took 3 hours to move the data to his IPOD and the computer was in safe mode so it was running a lot slower than normal. The first few attempts he made to fix it failed, his Windows XP Cd was not working, so he ran around the city trying to find another copy from a friend. Then after about 4 and a half agonizing hours, my computer was functional again. I had lost most of my files, a lot of software, but I can't complain. It could have been worse. If Muscles hadn't been so good with computers, i would have had to pay through the nose to fix it, and perhaps would have lost all my pictures (most are backed up on CD's in Canada), all my downloaded songs and TV shows.

I have been busy re-downloading many programs, because my computer is now pretty bare, but it is running so much quicker! And Muscles installed an awesome anti-virus program on my system so we can hope to avoid this situation in the future.

Crisis diverted! And my heart is beating regularly now.