This past weekend while on line doing some genealogy research I happened to come across a personal site referring to a "Ledford." Well what happened next sure caught me by surprise, one of the new scam oriented virus’s jumped right in the middle of my monitor. Can you imagine what was going through my mind at that moment? Yes, it was those famous last words recorded on so many black boxes of crashing airplanes "Oh Shoot!"
I had just finished up a long restore session with Bruce Kalashian, KB4GW, this week where he got slammed by a Trojan virus so I was all tuned up and alert. It hit my monitor right in the middle of doing a major AV disk scan. Then I hit the ALT F4 keys shutting down the browser and locked the firewall down in almost 2 nanoseconds. Now I know some of you mouse users are sitting out there in the middle of no mans land wondering "why did he do ALT F4?" ALT F4 is a known keyboard short cut time saver. You just hit the ALT key and the F4 key at the same time and whatever screen is on your monitor gets closed right now. None of this searching for the little dialogue boxes or the "red X" If you never learn another thing in your computing life span learn how to shut down your computer fast it can save your butt! In all reality it has nothing to do with your butt at all it is your "peace of mind."
The main thing to remember also when dealing with virus dialogue boxes is the programmer of the virus is counting on you to be stupid. That is right STUPID enough to click on one of his so cleverly disguised trip wires, the YES NO or RED X buttons. By using the ALT F4 keyboard shortcut you don’t touch the screen bomb and blow YOURSELF UP!
A alternative solution would have been to reach down at my feet and pulled the plug on the whole mess and shut it down to the whole world. Dealing with an improper shutdown is nothing when you compare it to a disk format and reloading all that software again. For my system it takes almost 36 man-hours from start to finish.
I hope that no one ever has to be confronted with a situation like that. But if you can remember ALT F4 you could just save yourself a trip to the repair shop, hours of aggravation and heart ache.