PC341 Central Sumatra, Indonesia

internet café wiped my memory card Two words Back up !.. After 28 mins in the Indonesian internet café no problem, but I decided I was going to stop at 30 minutes because the computer was so slow it must have a virus on or something. So I decided to copy 2 emails to my memory stick ; a complete disaster. This should have taken 10s, but after 2 minutes I pulled the stick out and found a virus had renamed all my directories as filenames, which when you try to click on then starts a virus Visual Basic program. Thankfully my pocket PC does not run Visual Basic The guy at the café was not surprised with his antivirus program he was able to recover most of my files (music from Adelaide and videos of concerts I had made, my only copies), but he couldn't put then back on my memory stick as his PC was infected with the virus. He put them on a CD which he made me pay for. Crazy since when I checked the antivirus program on their PC had expired and had not been updated for one year. So just make sure you don't risk losing your data the same way. You can set the tab on your memory card to Read Only, so viruses cannot write, or check the antivirus program is upto date. And back up your data every month by doing a file search on files changed in the last month and then copying them to a memory stick. (Actually my 1Gb SD memory card now costs $8 in Singapore.) The virus make use of Visual Basic, but most people don't use the VB function on their PC so one handy thing you could do is turn it off : If you know what you are doing then you can rename the vbscripting files in windows/system32 and change the "file associations" to make .vb files open with Notepad. Most people don't use the VB function the virus uses so you can also disable .vb files by renaming the vbscripting files in windows system Back up ! Actually I fixed the memory card. On a virus protected machine in File Explorer I set the thing to show all hidden files and show file extentions. Then I could see it had made virus files with the same name as my directories. At the same time it had made my original directories "hidden" so they were still there. Also the virus had put 2 other programs boot.exe and autorun so I renamed them so they don't work now.

<-- PREVIOUS PC

HOME

Index 2006-7 INDEX

TRAVEL INDEX

stew@stewgreen.com

NEXT -->