Blast!

Well our trusty desktop is not so trusty anymore. I talked to my Anti-virus company today, and they were very helpful, but they basically told me that we needed to copy all of our necessary things off of our computer, wipe it, and reload all of our programs--it was THAT BAD. I had tried a few antivirus programs to get the sneaky virus almost a year ago (Spybot and Hijacker), and the guy was impressed--he figured a professional had been working on it (go stay-at-home mom ingenuity!), but whatever got to our system was diabolical and irremovable in the conventional ways.

Ben copied everything (thank goodness), and then got ready to start the wipe. Apparently you are supposed to disconnect everything from the computer beforehand, so he went to do that. When he turned the computer back on we got an error about the heat chip or something. Ben looked it up on his laptop and apparently our model of Dell has a problem internally with this heat chip thing (nearly 2000 complaints, but they refuse to call it a defect and offer to fix it--grr!), and when it happens it can wipe your motherboard and memory--thank goodness we already backed that all up! You actually have to get it re-soldered on to the motherboard, and because it is the heat chip--you have to be oh so careful with heat--go figure!

Best Buy wants a $150 non-refundable deposit just to send it out to Dell to fix it, which will be over $300 at the least and non-guaranteed. With the price of computers these days, we're not sure what we'll do. At least we have Ben's little laptop. It is ancient and bare bones in computer terms, but it will have to do for awhile.

If I'm not blogging as often, you'll know why! Especially when Ben starts school again in the Fall, because he is on this baby for hours a night then! Oh...it may also take me awhile to figure out how to get pictures onto this computer too--we'll see!

Thanks for thinking of us.