Spent the entire day trying to clear my laptop of a very persistent and irritating piece of malware. I've been looking for a no compact disc "patch" for caesar 3 ever since I upgraded to version 1.0.1 and have had little success until then, all the "patches" i found were only for version 1.0. Finally I found this link from a suspicious looking website. By then, I had exhausted all other possible options such as trying to make a mini image, copying various files... nothing worked. I knew if I really wanted to I could copy the entire image from the CD but that would take up too much space. So I downloaded the "patch". This patch was probably the fifth or sixth one that I tried and my guard was down. My antivirus was outdated and I did not bother to scan it online ( I did so for the first few ones). Opening the file, a command prompt popped out... and stayed longer than it should. A feeling of dread filled me as I noticed multiple popup windows appearing across the screen. Spyware. Adware. Malware. The scourge of the internet, and one of the things I detest. Little message boxes started popping out and balloon bubbles containing ads floated up from the taskbar. It was going to be a long, long day.

Here I am, nearly 12 hours later with my PC finally clean again (hopefully). The malware deleted all my system restore points and fixing it was tricky. But I finally managed. Lesson learned: Prevention is better than cure. And now, it's time to go to bed.