When it rains, it pours....

My primary laptop, a Dell over ten years old, had begun showing signs of instability, climaxing in a crash. I was able to turn it back on and it worked as usual, but I decided to take it in to my local computer shop, and have them swap out the hard drive -- an almost new solid state drive I'd replaced the original with less than a year ago. Plus swapping it got me a newer machine but with my preferred Windows 7 OS and all my settings preserved.

Fortunately I have a backup laptop, a Gateway. Given I run my business via email and do a lot of proofreading checking of names and terms via Google, plus need to run printers and scanners, redundancy is a no-brainer. So I fired up the backup, and did some websurfing before settling down to work.

Everything was going fine, when suddenly as I was moving the cursor to click on a favorite link.... BAM! I'm hijacked to a "Windows support" page, with a dire warning, on screen and being monotonously repeated by a woman's voice, that I'd been redirected to a pornographic website and had five minutes to call the number on the screen so that a technician could walk me through how to free myself.

I could move the cursor but nothing else worked -- couldn't even get to the shut off button. So I took out the battery. When I put it back in and turned the laptop back on, the same damned screen and voice came up. I debatteried again, put it back in, and tried starting in safe mode. It came up in limited form, but when I tried clicking on the Firefox icon, it opened on a page with a clearly porn URL. Shut it off and hauled out a notebook with Windows 10 on it (which I hate; my working computers are Win7) and used it for whatever work checking I needed to do.

Sigh. Off I went to the computer shop the next morning, where I was able to collect my rehoused primary laptop, and left the prisoner of porn site to be reamed out and restored. That laptop happens to be one I hadn't installed Adblock on since I rarely use it for web browsing, but since I suspect I got the infection from my cursor dragging over an infected ad (I certainly wasn't clicking on any unknown links!) I'll for sure install that when I get the machine back sometime next week.

You don't want to know what this is costing me. And out of an abundance of caution last night I logged onto my desktop (yes, I have three Internet-connected computers, plus two ancient XP machines offline but still functioning) and changed a bunch of passwords, just to be safe -- so now I've had to change them on the returned laptop, and will have to go through all that when I get the Gateway back.

Ah, computers, how much easier they've made our lives....