2001-11-29 - 11:56 p.m.

Surveying the Damage

As I mentioned a few days ago, I had another little computer disaster.

Basically, my computer just kept getting more and more bogged down. It was getting more crash-prone, and this was especially when I was using my chess analysis software. In spite of the large amount of memory my computer has, it was filling up. What gives?

I assumed that it was something to do with the chess analysis engine I use. While it thinks, it creates hash tables so it doesn't have to keep looking at the same variations over and over again. My theory was that these hash tables were taking up too much memory and occasionally overwriting important system stuff.

Then, I lost the ability to get on the internet. This nearly cause me to lose my fleet while playing Planetarion since there was a bad attack I needed to retreat from. Luckily, at the last moment it occurred to me: I could pull my attack using Lily's computer.

Late at night, things like that are slow to occur to me.

So Lily, the resident computer expert here at the Hamster Palace, sat down with my machine and did a diagnostic. What she found was quite alarming: my computer was heavily virused.

Some of them were harmless but annoying. There was one called "Shapes" which caused all sorts of weird, colored geometric patters to appear on any Word documents I opened at certain times of day. Word has been doing that for years! I thought it was just a bug in Word!

Well, now I know: any weird behavior like that is probably virus-caused.

More serious was something called "Web-hancer" (I think). It was some sort of spyware that had come bundled with something I downloaded with some other program, probably my music-downloaded satellite. It screws up your system, and if you try to uninstall it, it screws it up worse.

So, my computer was a mess. Lily tried to anti-virus it, and had some success, but it was still plainly very sick. It was starting to look like I was going to have to re-format my hard drive, a cure that was worse than the disease.

Can you tell by the way that I'm talking that I'm not a person who makes frequent back-ups? Twice a year is a lot for me. I suspect most people are like me and just assume that D-Day will never happen. Catastrophic disk failure is something that happens to OTHER people.

This is spite of the fact that a couple years ago I had a crappy Hewlett-Packard system that needed to have its hard drive replaced TWICE in the space of six months.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to get a lousy grade at it.

Anyway, as a last ditch try Lily decided to install Windows XP, the latest version of Bill Gates' monstrous bloatware, on my machine. Lily had heard that it was miles better than its predecessors, and had already installed it on her machine, with some success.

I really didn't want to have anything to do with it - I was happy with my operating system the way it was. However, stuck with a sluggish, crash-prone machine that wouldn't get on the Internet, I suddenly had a more open mind.

Lily did a final un-virusing, and then installed the mother. It took ALL DAMN DAY to install it practically.

Well, to cut to the chase, the fix worked. Just about everything works again, and I can get on the internet again. Whew.

However, there was a lot of collateral damage. I lost a lot of stuff.

I lost a lot of my Word documents. They all seemed to be infected, probably with "Shapes" and some other stuff. Bye-bye to all my files that had all my old Uberhamster entries. Oh well.

Nearly all my email was lost. If you've written me an email recently and I haven't replied, it's because it was lost in this conflagration. If you want a reply from me, please re-send.

My email address-book is gone. I don't have a record of anyone email addresses, except on hard copy I've printed out. Again, if you want an email from me you need to send me new mail.

All my saved games in the various computer games I have seem to be gone. So, it's back to go-karts in Carmageddon again. Rats!

Most of the links on my list of favorites, including many Diaryland diaries. Are now non-working. Guess I'm going to have to rebuild my list of links. Actually, I'm sort of looking forward to it.

Another thing that was lost - all the passwords that were saved automatically in Internet Explorer, including the password to this diary. Luckily I wrote down the password to Uberhamster in my little black phone book.

My chess software now works... sorta. The most powerful analysis engines seem to be non-working, and various errors keep cropping up when I run ChesssBase, my chess database program. Fritz, my chess-playing computer engine, seems to be a total mess.

I sent an email to the manufacturers of these programs and they essentially said: "We're a Windows 95/98 platform, pal! You're on your own!"

Swell. Well, the most important stuff still works, and all my chess databases are still there. They are hard to back up because they are so huge. Losing them really would have been a disaster. Literally thousands of hours of labor went into making them. Dodged that bullet.

Still I have this odd feeling about my computer, like I've just discovered that I have a best friend I can't really trust. However, at the same time that most of the stuff that got deleted was just useless clutter that I should have deleted myself.

Let's see if my next computer housecleaning can be a little more voluntary.