New Year, New Virus
Lisa and I went back into Reno last night, first to have dinner at the Nugget and get our entries for the 11 PM drawing activated, then to go shopping, then to return to the Nugget for the drawing itself. Our slot machine luck finally caught up with us, but I ended up winning $20 at video blackjack and Lisa got a nice payout from the Batman machine just before the 11 PM drawing, so the net effect was only to be down about $3 or so for the night. I suggested that Kuma Bear, our mascot and good luck charm, wasn't really on his game last night. I said to Lisa, "He must a bit hung over from having too many Salmon Shooters."
We didn't win the $10,000, although the odds were much better last night than on New Year's Eve since there were far fewer people there. Once again the first name drawn didn't show up, but the second one did. The drawing was conducted by the man we call "The Prize Guy," and he's come to recognize us, too. (Lisa and Kuma Bear are memorable.) Last night's drawing was made by Stephen Ascuaga, son of the Nugget's founder, John Ascuaga and COO of the hotel. After the drawing, while I cashed in the winning voucher from Lisa's win on Batman, Lisa took the chance to brace up Mr. Ascuaga and praise his casino-resort, which he seemed to appreciate.
We returned home to Fernley and I got online and ran through messages. After a little while, boxes popped up that claimed that "Your computer is infected with spyware! Scan with XP Antispyware 2012 now!" The windows were acting like the XP Security suite, but I could see that they weren't quite what they claimed to be. OTOH, I couldn't see how to get rid of them. Fortunately, my other computer was working, and it didn't take much searching to find references to the XP Security 2012 virus and instructions from answers.microsoft.com and bleepingcomputer.com on how to get rid of it. It's a little time-consuming because you first have to run a program to stop the immediate problem (the virus inserts itself in such a way that it runs itself instead of any EXE file you select), then (without rebooting, since that would reactivate the virus), download and run MalwareBytes and do a full system scan. I left that scan running and went to bed. This morning, I finished the virus removal (the scan took hours) and my machine seems back to normal. Good thing I have two working computers here!
(The personal D600 dell seems to be behaving itself now that I've put the system files on a smaller partition, so the "137 GB problem" isn't raising its head. I hope.)
We didn't win the $10,000, although the odds were much better last night than on New Year's Eve since there were far fewer people there. Once again the first name drawn didn't show up, but the second one did. The drawing was conducted by the man we call "The Prize Guy," and he's come to recognize us, too. (Lisa and Kuma Bear are memorable.) Last night's drawing was made by Stephen Ascuaga, son of the Nugget's founder, John Ascuaga and COO of the hotel. After the drawing, while I cashed in the winning voucher from Lisa's win on Batman, Lisa took the chance to brace up Mr. Ascuaga and praise his casino-resort, which he seemed to appreciate.
We returned home to Fernley and I got online and ran through messages. After a little while, boxes popped up that claimed that "Your computer is infected with spyware! Scan with XP Antispyware 2012 now!" The windows were acting like the XP Security suite, but I could see that they weren't quite what they claimed to be. OTOH, I couldn't see how to get rid of them. Fortunately, my other computer was working, and it didn't take much searching to find references to the XP Security 2012 virus and instructions from answers.microsoft.com and bleepingcomputer.com on how to get rid of it. It's a little time-consuming because you first have to run a program to stop the immediate problem (the virus inserts itself in such a way that it runs itself instead of any EXE file you select), then (without rebooting, since that would reactivate the virus), download and run MalwareBytes and do a full system scan. I left that scan running and went to bed. This morning, I finished the virus removal (the scan took hours) and my machine seems back to normal. Good thing I have two working computers here!
(The personal D600 dell seems to be behaving itself now that I've put the system files on a smaller partition, so the "137 GB problem" isn't raising its head. I hope.)