Obliviots from the Planet Oblivia

Last night I downloaded a video component to my laptop. Unfortunately, it was late (which apparently made me rather dumb), because even though my virus shield warned me, I clicked 'Yes' instead of 'Cancel' (or some hairbrained equivalent of that sequence) by mistake. Downloading the infected component caused the operating system to become uselessly unstable. I ran a virus scan and a spy sweeper scan and isolated/deleted all the resulting Trojans, but it was too late - the damage was already done. The system would run for a few seconds and then Explorer would quit and restart - the system wouldn't reboot, but Explorer would cut in and cut out over and over again.

I had to reconstruct the operating system from the recovery disk image. So much for all the wonderful (virus-free) DivX software I downloaded. DivX had to be wiped out along with everything else on the computer, including email ... so I lost all the DivX serial numbers. I set the recovery manager to wipe all my files, since even though I'd run a scan (amid all the crashing and instability), I didn't know if the machine was actually clear. It's now reset to factory specs. Luckily, all my work files were stored on a backup disk before this happened.

Work computer or not, I am leaning progressively toward wiping out Vista and putting Ubuntu on the laptop.

Meanwhile, note to self: "Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain."