Knowing When To Fold

My husband has had enough. He has been strongly hinting that he was about ready to wipe the hard drive to eradicate the malware since last Thursday. The only things stopping him was time available to get the job done and the status of my personal files which have not been backed up anywhere since I got the laptop in September 2005. He is not hinting anymore. Time constraints will be lessened after the Mother's Day shipping rush is over this week. So the only thing holding him back from taking the tack he deems best for the computer is my files.

He would now like to see me put the same tenacity and time into the project of preparing my files for backup as I have been putting into playing Whack-A-Mole with the malware over the last eleven days. He is giving me until the morning of Saturday the 19th. On that day he wants to reformat the disc and boot back up wit the original factory discs.

Between what the two of us have learned over the last eleven days as we watched these moles operate and the AVG scans find them and wipe them only to see them pop their heads up again immediately upon log on or immediately upon use of a browser, he is fairly confident that AVG has locked the door against new intrusions. What we are fighting now is the ones that got in while our guard was down and planted replicating ability in the system restore files. There are just a few and AVG finds them again with the next daily scan. Always the same few segments somewhere in the file name.. But it is a tiresome and time-consuming game. We are both weary of it.

Yesterday, I may not have been ready to hear what he had to say tonight. I still don't like it. I hate giving up the game. I want to win. I want to track those #%$# down and see their faces as I aim the flamethrower into their burrow. I want to take down names and go after them in the real world where they live--not with flamethrowers but with fines and penalties that will make them think hard before participating in such anti-social behavior again. I also want to go after the businesses whose ads and websites are being promoted by these methods. If shaming them out of participating in such schemes won't work then fines and penalties, class action suits maybe. I don't know. I'm just seeing red right now.

But as much as I would like to win, I would like even more to be spending my time and energy on projects that energize me instead of enervate me. So, I am cutting and running from the mole hunt and turning to collecting my valuables out of the garden so that I can bring them back and replant them after the mole warren has been destroyed.