Anti-virus Software

I’m certainly not a computer geek. I don’t think I’m any kind of geek, but I’m not sure what a geek actually is, so I’d best soft-pedal the self-appraisal.

Because I’m not a geek, I am, evidently, very susceptible to an insidious disease to which non-geeks are prone. I recently caught a dreaded virus, a computer virus. I’m pretty sure the disease isn’t fatal, but I’ve heard rumors of infected people suddenly exhibiting very erratic behavior including loud utterances, wild uncontrollable gestures, and even violence involving inanimate objects.

Of course, it is not I who was actually infected, it was my computer. None the less, my symptoms were very real, and I shared the same lethargy, confusion and decreased productivity as my trusted laptop. Much, I suppose, as we all suffer when a dear friend and companion is ailing, or when a loved one is stricken with a serious and debilitating disease. I couldn’t seem to get started on any new task, anything I did seemed to take forever, and often I would completely forget what I was doing and have to start over. Sometimes I would get so overwhelmed, I would literally “crash” and have to take a nap.

I was comforted, however, in the knowledge that cures for this particular disease were widely available on the internet. One might ask, and this is a reasonable query, why my computer didn’t have preventetive software pre-installed by the manufacturer (why wasn’t it vaccinated, so to speak).

Alas, it wasn’t, but I quickly located a highly regarded and virtually, pardon the pun, free software to cure the ailment. I quickly downloaded and installed the software (it took about 3 hours but I’ve learned that computer hours are like dog years in reverse, 3 hours to us being only 20 minutes to software manufacturers). And, in fact, the software is working as advertised. The virus, actually many viruses I’ve since learned, are gone and I’m confident they will not return. If they do, they will quickly be vanquished by the software that is constantly “running in the background to provide 24/7 protection.”

Unfortunately, because the software is constantly running in the background, my computer is not running very well in the foreground. It takes forever to open a new program, then takes forever to run it. Often a program will stop running completely and have to start over. Sometimes the processor gets so overloaded, the computer literally “crashes” and “goes to sleep” (takes a nap, so to speak).