Joyeux 4 Juillet!

Happy belated 4th of July! (Where applicable)
I had a pretty awesome 4th BBQ at coyoteseven's parents's place.
We had delicious food and drinks (I brought a pre-chilled 12-pack of Pepsi Throwback) and fireworks.
The burgers were really good. A friend made a tasty potato salad in the Mediterranean style.
I left at 04:30 and got home at near-light-speed.
I'll post more about the BBQ later because I have yet to go to bed.
I probably should though, eyelids are getting heavy.

I haven't been posting on LJ much because I've been busy killing off trojans and viruses and assorted nastiness on my machine.
I knew there was something wrong with Ye Olde PC when my browsers started taking up to a minute to load the next page, or process button presses.
AVG has been fired as my anti-virus and Avira has taken its place. I've also added Malwarebytes to my arsenal.
Thanks to these worthies, my machine is ALMOST clean. There's just one bit of nastiness to remove:
the BOO/Sinowal.E boot sector virus.
I followed the instructions from the Avira people: download the Boot Sector Repair Tool, burn the ISO to a CD, boot from the CD and run the program.
It failed to remove it.
After I have gone to bed and woken up, I will explore other means to remove this damned thing.

In the meantime, it's making life hell for me as far as accessing complex websites is concerned.
eBay and PayPal are two sites that are particularly slowed down. I can't have that.
So a solution will be found later today, by gum!

May the Fourth be with you.

FLAWLESS VICTORY

The BOO/Sinoval.E boot sector virus has been NUKED from my computer!
Everything is back to normal and the browsers are humming along smoothly.
I had to learn strange esoteric skills, like changing the BIOS so my PC would boot from the CD-ROM drive, installing and turning on the Windows Recovery Console, and using it to rewrite the Master Boot Sector on my C drive.
It was all a little scary as I had never done anything like this before.
But it's done! And I know how to do it now.
I have changed my passwords on all the sites I accessed while Sinowal was active, like eBay, PayPal and my bank.
I'll have to keep an eye for any possible hanky-panky on those accounts.
Thanks go to that wonderful German application, Avira AntiVir, for being the only program to actually find Sinowal and help me nuke it.
Sinowal has been around for over three years now and it is a great danger.
Keep scanning your computers!