Fiiiiiiiiiiiinally!

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh! I have my laptop back again!

It had been with my friendly neighbourhood IT guys for an entire week after it went completely mental.

Around the 17th of May my antivirus software calmly announced that it hadn't received its scheduled update.

'Bloody thing,' I thought and clicked on the manual 'Update' button.

The update failed.

I tried again.

Fail.

I tried a bunch more times.

Fail fail fail.

I ran the antivirus software scan.

It found a couple of things.

I deleted them.

I tried to update again.

Fail.

OK, let's click the button that gives you more information on why the update is failing.

Oh good, now it's failing to open the Microsoft Help Website, that's not weird at all.

Let's see what happens when I try to validate my genuine copy of Windows.

Ah. It won't do that either.

That's not suspicious at all.

I asked a friend what else I could do.

She suggested a couple of websites that offer open source antivirus tools.

I tried to visit them.

I couldn't.

Yep.

Perfect.

Oh and look at that, my computer has failed a scheduled validation of my genuine windows software and if I don't rectify this - which I can't - my antivirus software will lapse altogether.

That's. Just. Excellent.

It was at that point that I disconnected from the internet and handed it over to the tender ministrations of the IT clan.

The virus took some eradicating, then they tidied up the files and deleted any extra unnecessary faff, ran a few checks, found some corrupted segments of drive, saved all my files elsewhere, reformatted my computer, updated everything, put my files back onto it and delivered it back into my loving arms.

I've survived alright without it seeing as I had my swish new phone to check in on emails and social media and even websites if I didn't mind them being tiny but my laptop has all my music, all my photos, all my files...

I already had copies of everything on a terabyte drive for safety but it's not the same as having them on a laptop that you can just open and access anywhere rather than having to wait until you're at work and plug your drive into your work computer.

Welcome back, little laptop, I missed you.