Viruses: Bad for Computers and Humans

The past two weeks has been extremely slow for me, myself and my home computer were infected with viruses. Finally, both of us are getting better. So, the story begins with me coming back from vacation with the flu, feeling very lazy, and doing some web surfing. I noticed that all ads on websites on all browsers were the same, and they were for pills to increase the size of a certain part of the male anatomy (these were not present before the holidays, maybe guests clicked on a bad link or something?). Next, I noticed that when I did a Google search, links were redirected to advertising websites and when I tried to sign in to my Gmail account, a message like "link is not valid" would appear. Something was terribly wrong. I tried to do a virus scan, but none of my antivirus software would update, things had gotten worse. My girlfriend then took over, she was virus free and went on the Tech 101 Forum (extremely useful) and they gave her step-by-step instructions on how to get rid of the virus. It took ~5 days to get rid of it, and at some points we could not access our C or D drives. Now, the computer and myself are feeling better, and are looking forward to a wonderful winter of blogging.