Losing a Whole Weekend

I'm about ready to go back to pen and paper. Only through the kindess of a very good neighbor can I even be online right now.

Over the past five days we have gone from a healthy PC (or so we thought), to one that wouldn't boot up, to one that I restored from a recovery DVD, to one with no protection . . . and thus began the torture of the last 24 hours.

I learned the hard way that a hardware firewall is absolutely necessary. If you are only counting on virus and spyware scanning, and then you have to restore everything and have a few hours before you can reinstall the software, well, you are screwed. It only takes a little tiny window for the demons to pounce. And even then, your anti-spyware software is only as good as what the vendor knows about.

Today, I have taken major steps to prevent this from happening again. Let's hope.

Further update in a couple days. I have a deadline looming ahead.