Spring Break
Computer virus kills way of life
Column: The jig is up!
Sumukh Torgalkar
Issue date: 1/28/05 Section: OpEd Page
Earlier this week, I suspected that my laptop had been infected by some sort of virus, a virus that, sadly, Kroger brand Tussin, the cure-all for every illness, could not fix. My computer had slowed down to the point that it was like Turtle in the old Nintendo "Track & Field" game, and there was no way running on the floor pad with numbers could save it. After doing some investigating, I thought that the problem was in a file named Dr. Watson's Postmortem Debugger. This saddened me, not just because it had damaged my computer, but because Dr. Watson had turned bad guy on me all of a sudden. This wasn't the same Dr. Watson who acted like a boob while Sherlock Holmes found a tiny fingerprint on the floorboard of a hidden attic in a shack fifty miles away that solved the crime. No, this was a much more sinister Dr. Watson. Then, upon further research, I discovered that Dr. Watson's Postmortem Debugger was created to help secure your computer, so it turned out that burning my copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles as vengeance against the good Doctor was a useless act.So, desperately needing a computer because all of our lives seemingly end without having one, I ventured to the computer lab to write up this column. If I try to open up Microsoft Word at home, it closes automatically in five seconds. This proves to be a serious problem for an English major, and gives me one of two choices: either I've got to go running like a madman to find the nearest computer, as I did in this case, or I need to discover an old typewriter, and play the Murder, She Wrote theme song in the background. Didn't you love solving mysteries with Jessica "J.B." Fletcher in a town where the Dr. Watson character was now played by a Sheriff, and you wondered why they were paying him if an elderly woman was solving all the crime? No?!My roommate, a computer science major, then installed Spyware Doctor, a program that apparently got its doctorate in being a garbage man, as it rid my computer of several files that were slowing it down. I went to bed with my computer jumping from Turtle to Cheetah. I awoke the next day, and attempted to print a document, and soon found myself with another problem. The computer was saying that my printer was not being found, and that there was an error in attempting to add a printer. This was quite a conundxrum, and I was fed up. I decided that I had to somehow get in touch with Compaq, but how could I elude the hour I would have to wait to speak with one of my people in India, and then spend another hour for them to re-route the call to someone in Houston? I soon found an alternative and was able to chat with an "online technician." I spoke with a technician named Vivian, and as of press time, "Aunt Viv" has e-mailed me with what hopefully will be the remedy to my computer dilemma.So, that's it. I have no Microsoft Word, and I have no functioning printer. I'm moving to Cabot Cove.
