This past week has been a challenging week for me when it comes to using my computer. Last weekend my desktop got infected with a Trojan called VirtuMonde (read about it here ) and it took me almost the whole weekend to finally get rid of it. And then today I discovered how my laptop's Windows XP registry got messed up for some unknown reason. That took me another hour or so to get it fixed. And it was only made possible by a stroke of luck. I'll explain as we go along.

It is an easy thing to get into a false sense of security when it comes to your computer. Even for a techie guy like myself. I have a well known antivirus software installed on my PC and have always kept the virus definition files up to date. That should keep me reasonably protected. I said "reasonably" because no computer is 100% safe or immune. That is until the dark force strikes.

This particular day I noticed my Windows PC was running somewhat slower than usual. That usually is a give away that your computer has picked up something undesirable. Then other strange thing started to happen. Browser windows started popping up with warning that I need this or that software. File browser windows closed suddenly when they were not meant to. And my Internet browser seem to freeze for a couple of minutes. This definitely calls for drastic action. The first thing I did was starting up my Spybot Search & Destroy software and did a scan on my computer files.

It is certainly hard to keep track of all the good and useful software readily available out there, and even more challenging to try them out as they are launched. Recently I came upon an article on Google Notebook, and since I am already a user of many of the Google applications like the Gmail, Calendar, Google Maps, etc, I decided to check out Google Notebook. Yes, I know I am a little behind time, as you might want to point out that Google Notebook has already been out for nearly two years. As I have mentioned in the beginning of this article, that it isn't an easy feat to try every good software that comes out. At least one good thing for a late comer like myself, by now they would have improved Google Notebook to a better level than when it was initially launched.

Recently, after making a journey of more than 2 billion miles taking three and a half years, NASA's spacecraft MESSENGER made its first flyby of the planet Mercury on Jan. 14. And it sent back more than 1200 close-up images and other scientific data of the planet. My first impression was "hey, that looks alot like our moon". After viewing some of those images, my second thought was "Earth is indeed a beautiful to call home". I have yet to find a planet any where nearly as beautiful as our planet Earth, even when viewed from space. The vibrant colors of our planet make it shine way above all other planets that we have seen so far through NASA's space exploration. It makes me appreciate Earth even more.

Recently I received an email with the subject title that reads something like "Steve sent you a friend request on Tagged :)". Since it came from someone I know, I naturally took a look at the email content. What it basically says was someone has added you as a friend on Tagged.com and the email looked like this:

My first question was whether this is a spam mail sent out by some kind of spyware or adware or even spammers. So I contacted the person whom the email supposedly came from, to find out if he did send that email. The answer was no. What actually happened was that he received the same email from someone else he knows, and out of curiosity he signed up at the sign up screen that looks like this: