E is for "Effervescent"

Two days ago I found myself in this predicament that I'd never thought I would be in – my laptop had a virus. Now I'm usually the most careful person out there, and maybe I'm no advance tech gal who has all systems in place (in truth, I would be on a Linux machine if I really wanted to be hardcore about it) but I do make the effort to have a paid antivirus software for everyone in the family. I would be the one constantly reprimanding my brother about his questionable website choices that seem always attached with a warning, or the one reminding my parents not to click this or do that.

But I still got it, and all because I was too trusting of an email.

The details of what transpired over the next two days are a bit complicated, but either I was hit by something new, or I lost confidence in two major antivirus software because they couldn't tell it existed. In the end, I decided to just do a fresh reinstall on Windows and hoped for the best.

In which that's what I've been mulling about now for awhile. If this had happened a few years back, I would be in a sort of crazy state right now, probably crying on the floor for the inevitable wipe. But I didn't. I looked over the files that I thought I had on my Downloads and Documents folder, but lo and behold, nothing was really too important to be even worth keeping.

Now I know this would have been a different scenario if it were on my work laptop, but this is my personal one – the one that I write these subpar entries on. The one where I boot up Steam to play some obscure VN or RPG Maker game. I thought I would've had a stronger attachment to the thing, but it turns out that I ended up caring more for other people's laptops than mine. Not to say that I wouldn't be unhappy if it became totally unusable, but I feel like my relationship with it has changed.

Aside from the old school papers I still had in here from a year ago, I don't think I've done anything major on Mulberry (my laptop's name) for about a year or so now. Most of my important files have been backed up on the cloud, tucked away for some future use – they're mostly pictures. Most of my usage solely rests on being in an open tab on Firefox instead. One one hand, I think it's amazing that technology has come so far that the average user only really needs one running application – an internet browser. But in the same vein, that sounds completely dangerous in a security stand point – if someone just cracks the code, all hell could break lose.

And so I wiped it clean. I have no idea if it's actually really virus free or not, and I still have to have that conversation with our work's IT guy tomorrow, but literally besides Firefox and my antivirus, it seems that nothing else will probably get installed on here for the time being.

Maybe Steam to play games, but we'll see.