August 2007 Archives

Alex had a couple of traumatic days last week and had his appendix taken out on Thursday afternoon. Wednesday night he was complaining of pains in the tummy and I didn't take alot of notice of him. It's not unlike Alex to complain about something about bed, then he gets up in the morning still complaining and wants a day off school. Sometimes I think he's setting it up the night before to stay home. I was in bed by 11 on Wednesday night and he came in again doubled over saying it was the worst pain he'd ever felt. I said that he might need to go to the toilet, or drink some water, and after another half an hour he was still in pain. Thinking it might be something serious, I got dressed and took him to the Junee Hospital, where we waited for about 15 minutes for the doctor to arrive. He poked and prodded and said he'd like a second opinion, and sent us over to the Base Hospital in Wagga.

You can wait around at the Wagga Base Hospital for up to 4 hours before you're seen sometimes, and although we went straight in to Emergency, it was hours before the doctor finally came. No-one was 100 percent certain that it was Alex's appendix that was causing him the pain: he had only some of the symptoms. Around 3:30 he was actually admitted and he was taken up to the Children's Ward, and at 4 the nurse made me up a bed in the playroom. At 7 am another doctor was there to have a look at Alex and they decided he should have an ultrasound. His pain wasn't as bad as the night before, but still there, so at 11 were went over to the Calvary Hospital where they have the ultrasound equipment. At about 12 another doctor came and said that they didn't think it was his appendix, that they would give him something to eat and see how the pain was then. He might need further tests. She went off to confer with other doctors and around 3 pm, 3 doctors turned up, 2 of them surgeons, and said that they would take his appendix out. By this stage I was just shaking my head, not sure if any of them knew what they were doing.

The doctors went off to find Alex a spot in the surgery schedule, and the nurse said he probably wouldn't go up until late, between 6 and 7, so I decided to go home and get Alex some clean clothes and toiletries, and have a shower and get changed myself. The battery on my phone gave up the ghost after working on one bar all day, so there was no way anyone could contact me until I got home. As luck would have it, I got home and there was 3 missed calls, all from the hospital, saying they were taking Alex to surgery at 4 and I should come straight back. It's a half-hour drive to Wagga from Junee and I quickly packed a bag for Alex, had a two-minute shower and went straight back over. I got there in time to go with the nurse to bring Alex back to the ward from Recovery.

Everything had gone okay and they removed his appendix, which was slightly enlarged. He was pretty dopey when they got him back into bed, and I stayed with him till about 8 on Thursday night. After only 3 hours sleep the night before, I was looking forward to my own bed. Carly was staying with a friend down the road so I didn't have to worry about getting her up from school, and I was back at the hospital at 9 am this morning in time to see the surgeon who assisted in the operation. He said that the operation went well and Alex only had a 2 cm cut, and would be able to go to school after a week or less. We could go home after he had something to eat. It was 4.30 before we could go, and by this stage Alex was getting around easily. You wouldn't think he had just been in surgery 24 hours earlier.

Okay, another three hours this morning pulling my hair, with the blue screen of death popping up after every reboot, and finally we have an internet connection and the computer is clean. Talk about a marathon. This morning, as luck would have it, I got an email telling me about the new version of Spyware Doctor.

When I installed this version it managed to find 315 problems, and needed to reboot to uninstall them. BSOD. Then I used AVG to do a virus scan and it found 23 Trojans, and after cleaning and deleting them the computer just turned off. I rebooted to Safe Mode and checked that every file AVG had detected was removed. All were, except in the folder Documents and Settings\Local Service\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content\IE5\ etc... were html documents that instructed the computer to download the offending installers. I deleted these files and after rebooting the computer again, with fingers crossed, everything loaded properly, I was able to download updates for the anti-spyware and anti-virus programs, and we had the internet.

The offenders:

• Deskbar BHO
• Trojan-Proxy.Wopla
• Backdoor.Agent.ALM
• Hijacker.DosPop-Toolbar
• Trojan-RPCC-Spammer
• SpamTool.Agent.U

Talk about a nightmare trying to get rid of these nasties. The trick is to have the latest versions of anti-spyware and anti-virus and make sure the definitions are up to date. I know this is hard after the nasties have stuffed the internet connection, but perseverance and stubbornness win in the end.

I spent the day at a friend's house fixing his computer and had a very frustrating afternoon. The anti-spyware and anti-virus were both out of date, the internet wasn't working and the computer would shut down automatically if you tried to get online. I tried one thing after another to get things to work, and at one stage did get the computer online. I installed the latest Spyware Doctor and AVG and the doc managed to find over 260 problems, but couldn't get rid of 5 of them, they kept coming back. AVG tried to clean a few viruses (trojans) and the computer kept shutting down, after a small tmp file was added to the C drive, making the damn thing come back after every re-boot.

I had a headache that just got worse as the afternoon went on, and left there with a windows repair going on, I'll have to go back tomorrow and see how that went. I wrote down a couple of the registry entries that the doctor couldn't delete and got no hits on Google, which is unusual, because generally you find the same problems with someone else.

I should have written down the names of the trojans and would have had better luck finding out how to delete them, and if I have no luck tomorrow that's what I'll have to do. I don't enjoy working all week just to have my weekends taken up with rotten little trojans that can't be removed!

Yesterday my new computer was delivered and I was up till 1:30 am installing XP and all the software that I use. Tweaking it just so was also a priority and I'm so thankful that I've documented all the changes I've previously made.

Yesterday lunchtime I ran a Ghost backup so I'd have all my recent email and documents, only to discover later that it didn't work, I was shattered, losing everything for the last two months. Thank God I had a backup from June, so it wasn't so devastating.

The new computer is so fast, I'm rapt. It has double the ram of my old one and that makes all the difference. Multi tasking should be a breeze with the dual core processor. I'm happy now with my newest toy. We'll reshuffle the computers around for Alex and Carly, both will get an upgrade and Alex is excited because his old computer was running Windows 98 and not up to playing alot of the games he wanted. It will take some time though, there's hardware that will need swapping around, and first I have to get my old computer looked at: there's definitely something wrong with it. It makes a terrible noise when booting up and I think the fan is all but shot. It will be the second time I've had to replace it. Worth getting fixed though, it's a Pentium 4 and has been a good computer.

I'm running a Geforce 7200GS 128mb video card in the new computer and finally the 19 inch monitor I bought a few months back has the right resolution. It's an odd size, 1440 x 900, but the video card picked it right away, and no more fat pictures from widescreen LCD. The integrated 5.1 channel audio is perfect for surround sound, so I'll be making the most of the 30 GB of music I have on the computer.

I spent three days home from work this week with sinusitis and an upper respiratory chest infection, along with Alex who had tonsillitis, and did little else besides lay in bed watching DVDs and reading. I read the new Richard Bachman (AKA Stephen King) novel, Blaze, which I enjoyed and found a little sad. Though yesterday I was finding everything a little sad and shed tears during the book and a movie I watched. Perhaps it was more a case of feeling down being ill, I'm not sure.

Today I felt much better and Alex and I headed off for the Junee Schoolboys Football Carnival a little after 8am, and spent the day watching football and scoring a few of the games. Alex had just played his last game and in the last 5 minutes of the game the other team scored the only try that was scored against them all day. Needless to say the under 12s won the pennant again this year for the sixth year in a row.

Emily and Kai came over in the afternoon with Scarlett in the her pram, looking like a little doll (she's so beautiful!). We stayed long enough for a coffee. The day started out so lovely: clear skies and sunshine, but as the day went on the clouds rolled in and the wind started to blow and it was spitting rain by the time we left. Lauren had another driving lesson today and by the time we got home, her and Daniel had also arrived with Zeke and Riley. We watched the new Tenacious D movie The Pick of Destiny, which was pretty hilarious with some excellent music. Kai was going home to enjoy a bottle of his favourite (Wild Turkey Liqueur) so they left early, but Lauren and Daniel stayed til after 10. Alex and Daniel took the bikes to the skate park for an hour and spent another hour after they got home talking about the best scars we had and how we got them. (I'm still shuddering remembering some of Daniel's stories).

Tonight I took the plunge and bought a new computer (just the box) but it's a beauty and I've probably looked at it six times this week humming and harring about whether to buy it or not. My computer is still giving me problems so I thought, what the hell. The specs were impressive and the price was the winner.

Intel Dual Core E2140 Office System

• 1 X GIGABYTE GA-9VM900M Intel Core 2 Duo Motherboard, P4M900, DDRII, PCIE, VGA, GLAN
• 1 X Kingston 1GB RAM DDR2 667 2N5
• 1 X PIONEER DVR110 DVD BURNER SILVER OEM
• 1 X Palit BV/pa/ne7200Gtd16 GF7200GS PCI-E DDR2 128MB VIDEO CARD
• 1 X PC TOWER CASE WT-5277B 500W PS
• 1 X SYSTEM ASSEMBLING AND TESTING
• 1 X Intel Pentium Dual Core E2140 CPU, 1.6 GHz, FSB 800MHz, 1MB Cache, 65W, Socket LGA775
• 1 X WESTERN DIGITAL WD1600AAJS CAVIAR SE/160GB/7200RPM/SATAII/8MB/NCQ/160g platter