A few months ago, about five sites that I frequented a lot suddenly disappeared from my screen. Whenever I typed in their URLs, I got the typical "couldn't find the page" thing that always pops up when that happens. Not only that, but my entire desktop was wiped out and I can only access it and other files on my computer by doing the whole "ctl-alt-delete" exercise. The hard drive is a o.k., but there are about ten "anti-virus" programs that I have never downloaded, that are now on the computer. Now here's the kicker-I was told by a family techno-geek that the only way for me to cleanse the computer, would require me to lose the hard drive, unless a separate hard drive was installed and things were saved on it. Deleting programs? Forget it, when I go to do that, the program just shuts down.

So my question is this-What is the deal here? I'll probably lug the darn thing to some shop to get fixed-I am not mr. techno by any means. This whole thing has just been weird.