When Kelly got a big mess of malware on his computer this past Friday afternoon from an innocent-appearing download, he could think of nothing else. He ran a full anti-virus scan, and that did catch one of the several programs, but it must not have known how to handle it as it kept asking Kelly what to do. Just what he was asking too.

He commented on how hard it was to separate his computer from his own mind and thus how hard it was not to take it personally. He couldn’t use any of the three browsers he had on his Windows 7 laptop, they all showed a lot of weird garbage. It looked seriously bad.

After a sleepless night, he called a man in the town we are camped near, as we are at a state park in New Mexico in our motorhome. The man and his wife were people we didn’t know but had been referred to, mainly that we’d have things in common with them. Kelly reached the guy on the phone and after a few social niceties, Kelly asked him if he knew any computer specialists in the area, and he explained why he was asking.

“You need a program called Malware Bytes,” the man said. “There’s a free version and a more comprehensive one.”

“My browsers don’t work right,” Kelly said.

“Get your wife to download it onto a flash drive from her computer,” the local man said.

So  I did what the fellow suggested and then Kelly installed it and ran it.

Bingo! It found at least 140 different files that it identified as malware. Kelly took the program’s advice and had it fix them, whether that was quarantining or whatever.

He restarted his computer, re-established the default home tab on his browsers as it had been taken over, and…

And lived happily ever after, or so it seems. He’s planning to buy the premium version of the program (not very expensive) and keep it on his computer.

And yesterday we had a lovely visit and lunch with our benefactor and his wife. Kelly said, “I had a strong intuition to tell him about the problem. Glad I followed it.”