Monday, November 12, 2012

Disaster Averted!

Okay okay, I confess I haven't been around of late, or even building come to that.  That nasty thing called real life is still demanding lots of my attention, particularly on the job seeking front, and I had a major disaster... two in fact, with regard my computer.  I suffered a particularly nasty virus attack that locked the PC and disabled safe boot mode.  The first time it struck took me a couple of days to sort out.  The second time merely a couple of hours since I'd remembered how I got round it.  You can't be too cautious people.  I actually have a good virus checker that deals with files in real time, yet it missed this one twice.

Having thought the worst was over, I was horrified to discover that it had somehow messed with two of my games, being Neverwinter Nights and World of Tanks, somehow assigning them to the creation of further viral attacks and rendering the programs unusable.  Fortunately the virus checker caught the files they kept creating whenever I tried to run them, but I was unable to fix the problem and make the programs run.  This was quite a disheartening moment for me.  World of Tanks I could manage without, but the loss of Neverwinter meant that work was unnaccesable, and that I'd never be able to witness my son enjoy my creations.

Fortunately I'm a patient fellow, and I decided to persevere and tackle the problem.  Several days later, having uninstalled both programs then re-installed them (a somewhat painful task with NWN since it meant having to remember how I got it to run on my system in the first place, plus having to find the critical rebuild patch that Bioware no longer have available), I was relieved to find I'd fixed the problem, and especially pleased that I'd made backups of essential files.

So... fingers crossed, I'm now back in business, and quite excited about building again having overcome the initial sense of loss.

Right now I need a rest though ;)