Thanks for the info.

This is a great reminder for everyone who fails to BACK-UP their hard drive. We used to have a sign hanging up at work that said "Technology will fail you always, back up, back up, back up." You only have to lose some really important things once to learn the lesson.

Yes, I learned the hard way a week or so ago. hard drive crashed, I have what little I backed up a couple of months ago. Lost more than I saved.

Any ideas/suggestions on backing up a personal laptop?
thanks for any suggestions.

Buy an external hard drive (you can use this for a laptop or a desktop). It plugs into a USB port and acts like a really big flash drive (memory stick) and I copy all data files onto it. It is really easy since I set up my computer with a partitioned drive. The programs are loaded onto the C:\ drive and data is saved to the D:\ drive. When I back up, I just copy the D:\ drive.

Mac systems are a little different is procedure but the premise is the same. I'm not a Mac fan but have had to deal with them in the past.

Do you know where/how you got the virus? It might help us avoid going there. My computer is still not functioning at its best after the problem I had a couple of months ago.

I got the same virus a couple of weeks ago, and I didnt know what the heck to do with it, so I took it to a friends place, and she had it fixed for me in minutes. I beleive these virus, or trojans or what ever they are attach themselves to links. I used to visit a site frequently and never had a problem, then bammo!! I got the virus from that same site. At least i nkow what to do if that happens again!

Thanks for the info! You just never know!