My brother Larry and my friend Carlos never met a link they didn’t like. The latest thing is a warning message that comes up tells them their computer is under attack by a virus and they have to install the virus software to fight it. Naturally they comply and their machines are now zombies controlled by eastern European spammers. They both fell for the same scam.

They had Norton Antivirus and AdAware, but the malware seems to bypass these. I spent two hours last night on Larry’s machine reloading stuff and running in “diagnostic mode”, but I am not sure that I got rid of everything. I think I will format his disk and reinstall everything. It doesn’t help that Larry’s machine is some ancient piece of junk that he bought at a garage sale when the owners convinced him it was a great machine. Anything available at a garage sale for $10 is not a good computer.

I had a spare machine, but it crashed. It was a Dell XPS that Justine sent me, but it arrived all crunched and broken because the Fed-ex drivers played kick-soccer with it. I taped it back together, but the fans did not work right and it eventually over heated. I am slowly building a new machine out of parts, but it is not ready. I can’t afford to spend much, so critical parts are waiting for me to sell things on eBay.