...although a friend was wondering over precisely that a couple of hours ago when next to nothing went right with her order at the restaurant we had dinner at.

By now, I'm inclined to believe that today is, in fact, the 13th, and all our calendars are simply showing it wrong.

In short: My freaking computer keeled over, either dead or in a coma. Considering the boot sector of my C:\ drive seems to be fried, I'm tending towards "dead for good".

Typically, the last full backup I made was some time back in the fall last year.

Dammit, I already had a new computer - picked out, bought, carried home, unpacked... about a month ago. Only it was missing the right port to connect my monitor to, and due to the employées at the shop I got it from being unhelpful and outright rude, I took it back and resolved to wait a little longer and buy a faster (and by then, hopefully not much more expensive) machine some day in the future. Plus, I couldn't psyche myself up to deal with Windows 7 yet.

Well, now the joke's on me.

I'm quite sure the data on my separate F:\ drive is safe, but a lot of stuff had, due to severe lack of space, to stay on the C:\ drive... and what about all my e-mails?

:::weeps angry tears and gnashes her teeth:::

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Edit August 5, 2012: I bought a new computer the day after the crash, and by now, I've mostly gotten used to it. Mainly I love how quietly it runs, but the processor speed and the size of the hard drive is also awesome. Of course, Windows 7 is almost as exasperating as I expected it to be, and I miss a couple of programs I either couldn't reinstall or was afraid the 64-bit system wouldn't be able to cope with. I have all my files back (the computer guy made two house calls, and working together, we managed to retrieve the entire data off both hard drives despite the corrupted partition table), including my e-mails (although updating to the newest release of Mozilla Thunderbird was daunting - for a while, nothing worked properly). Yay?

Ever since Saturday night, I've been irritated with my Sygate Firewall because it always deactivated itself right after startup.

I first repaired, then re-installed Sygate, but to no avail.

So I scoured Google today, which finally led to some results when I figured out that I supposedly had the same process asking to access the internet twice - svchost.exe. One of them turned out to be a Trojan that hid in the C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\ directory.

I manually deleted it with a lot of savage satisfaction.

Then, after a good deal of preventative registry-cleaning, mainly with CCleaner v2.12.660, I downloaded and ran Malwarebytes' Anti Malware 1.28 which found the corresponding Trojan-infected key in the registry and deleted it. And let's just say, for the record: I'm seriously unimpressed with AntiVir. I've ran it three times since Saturday, and each time it found nothing amiss. Hah.

Boo, hiss!!! So much for my good impression of you, AntiVir!

Also helpful was this article.