Mother has two laptops. The older one, which she bought on her own, for some reason is used only for bill-paying and watching videos. The new one, which my brother gave to her as a gift, she uses mainly for Skype. Why she believes there needs to be such a separation, I have no fucking clue.
While my laptop's getting work done (the verdict: It's not the motherboard, which would essentially mean death for my lap, but just the hard drive ... which led me to go back to one of my original dreams of exchanging the hard drive for a solid-state drive, which people say is a lot better -- which reminds me: Tomorrow I have to call them to see what's going on) I thought I would use Father's desktop downstairs. But that computer is really slow and is doing some very strange things, particularly with the America Online gateway that Father relies on like a crutch because the only "Internet" he knows. What I mean by strange, for example, is the time I tried to blog through it: When I hit Alt+Tab from a website I brought up just to indulge my short-attention span, it does this thing where the paragraphs I have written are stacked upon each other a certain way, but then slide off of each other to form the paragraphs I created. It's like a blog that's a Transformer, or maybe a Gobot, since with a Gobot you had to move many fewer pieces to change it from a vehicle to a guy. Plus, it's very fucking cold right now, and I don't want to go down to the frigid basement. So I looked at Mother's new laptop, a Dell, saw that it has a new version of Windows (please, please, please let it be Windows 7 and not Windows 8 ...), and decided that I would much rather surf and type on a new laptop sitting on the dining room table.
Quickly after I started using the laptop (this one, the one in which I'm typing this blog post right now) however, I noticed one really creepy, stupid thing: Sometimes when I click on something on a page, on pops another window, as if I hit the "New Window" selection on the toolbar. And it's for something I don't recognize. It looks like a pop-up window, but I notice that the URL usually ends in "(some word)tursted.net." It goes away if I refresh the page, but this doesn't happen all the time, so you don't know when this ... feature is going to show up. And I hate that because I'm afraid I'm sending the maleficent sources behind this hackware personal information whenever I slip up and click open one of their links.
The thing is, though, is that I don't know how to get rid of it. First of all, I don't know if this particular laptop has any anti-virus software in which it can identify and eliminate viruses. Second of all, and the things that's even more surprising and scary, is that I Googled "tursted.net" and there were no hits. There were "trusted.net," but no "tursted.net." So it seems as if I have found the newest virus sweeping the world.
But what scares me the most began when I looked up this lap's Uninstall feature and list. I could not figure out which program begat this virus. So I just started uninstalling every single program that said was installed (not by me, at least not intentionally) after my parents left for Europe. There was one from Dell, the maker of this laptop, which means it's probably legit, but I took it off anyway. I don't know what I'm doing; I'm basically destroying the village in order to save the village.
And you know what? It still doesn't work. What the fuck!
So I'm stuck, especially since there is no anti-virus program on this laptop, at least not one I can find or recognize. Why the hell doesn't Mother put an anti-virus program on her computer? But of the three computer devices that are in the home right now, this one I'm working on works the best and fastest by far, even with the possibility that I brought on a virus that is infecting this laptop. So I'll just keep working on this and hope that I haven't, uh, diseased it.
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