joe randel's art dump

Here’s the short version of this post.

I’m a moron.

Here’s the long version.

My TabletPC has been getting quite slow over the past few years.  Sometimes I would be in the task manager I would just stare at all the things my computer was doing right in front of my face and yet, I had no idea.  What the hell where all those .exe files running in the background?  Sometimes I would do searches on them and see what they where.  Mostly they where all regular system files doing their job.  A few days ago however, during a search on .exe files.  I come across a link that will offer a free scan of my PC to rid it of all the extra crap that it’s running and slowing it down.  I was skeptical, but I clicked on it any way.  It took me to a site that had a download of a program that would do just what I described.  I downloaded it, but before I ran it, I did some research on it.  From everything that I read, it was a totally legit program (I can’t remember what it was called).  So I tried it and it worked.  My laptop ran a little fast and my Photoshop didn’t lag.  But then things took a nose dive.

It would seem that this program not only just kept run away exe’s in check, it deleted .dll files.  Important .dll files.  One that the computer need to run!  I rebooted my laptop to find that I was screwed!  I could get anything to load no matter what I did to try and save it.  I was going to have to do a full system recovery.

This sucked, but I’ve been meaning to do one for a while now, so this was as good a time as any.  I backed up all my art, music, photos and wrote down the programs that I needed to reinstall.  Then began the process that would take my laptop back to factory settings.  WAIT!!!  I forgot to back up my bookmarks!!!  To late…  they’re gone.  Sigh~

I guess it’s not the end of the world.  I only really visited a small fraction of them anyway and if that’s the only thing I lost… that’s not so bad.  On the plus side, my computer is really fast now.

So yeah, I totally learned my lesson.  Don’t trust anything you get from the internet.