Last week my laptop was brought down by some sort of virus attack.  All I know is that I was surfing at Ancestry.com when I got a pop up window that said something like “your computer has a virus” and “click here to fix”.  I clicked in the upper right hand corner to close the pop up and the whole computer froze.  I could not even start task manager.  All I could do was power down the machine and restart.  When I did, it was still frozen with a placard on the desktop saying something about virus infected and click here to fix.  My windows kernal had been changed and the only way to rid myself of this horrible situation was to re-install the operating system.  We have installed Ubuntu Linux, which in itself was not an easy task since we had to figure out a way to boot and install it from a thumb drive.  Ubuntu is the most popular desktop version of Linux.  We picked it because it has great hardware support, an easy installer, and a huge community of support.  Now I am using Linux with Firefox as a browser.  Firefox is less susceptible to virus attacks.  Not sure why. Right now we have no anti-virus software running at all.

The strange part about my computer being brought down by this virus is that one of my friends had the exact same attack about 2 months ago.  He also had to wipe his hard drive.  Ubuntu came with software for my scanner, open office, and even some photo editing software.  I could never afford to buy all that software from Microsoft.  So Linux was a simple choice based on the cost.