Live & Learn

I remember a time early in what I call my 'computer adolescences' in which I got into some downloading, one thing lead to the next, and I had a crazy virus. This virus not only wiped out my entire hard drive on my laptop, but it wiped out my external hard drive as well. To this day I still feel unbelievable stupid about this occurrence in my life. Not only was it costly, but it could have been adverted would I only have been up to date on my virus protection software.

What did I learn? For starters, don't procrastinate when it come to computer software updates. They're simple to do, but yet take time and patience that at the time I did not have. I now try and set reminders for myself on a monthly basis to check out certain things that need to be updated and rely on me doing so.

I also learned that I should not be so trusting of things I download from the World Wide Web. I was lucky in that I was able to save the backup data from my external hard drive. This isn't always the case when it comes to matters such as these, so becoming less trusting is a good thing as it pertains to this particular topic.

Above all else I think I realized at this point that there is a world out there that is just malicious. A world in which there is no thought or consideration for the laymen, like myself, that forget to update his/her anti-virus software.

Aside from feeling like a total noob at this point, I also felt as though it could be a good thing. There are other ways in which I would have liked to learn this lesson, but this is the way I had to go through in my life. The positives are harder to find, but in the end I was glad that I could learn how to deal with a situation such as this, and then how to stop it from happening in the future.

I'm around my computer all the time. There are going to be things that happen to me I won't always like on here. The time I got my first computer virus taught me not only to watch what I was downloading, but look toward the future and be more proactive in my learning about specific things that are going on in the computer world.

My PC will continue to impact my life, hopefully for the better from here on out.