When technology destroys itself.

A flawed update for McAfee VirusScan Enterprise took down an unknown number of corporate systems running Windows XP Service Pack 3 on Wednesday (April 21, 2010). According to reports, the faulty update caused affected computers to display an error message or a blue screen and to repeatedly reboot. "McAfee is aware that a number of corporate customers may have incurred a false positive error due to incorrect malware alerts," McAfee said in a statement. “The faulty update was quickly removed from all McAfee download servers, preventing any further impact on customers.” The security giant apologized for the blunder and issued a fix. It is unknown how many users were affected by the glitch.

Well, my friends, I know the Meads household was affected by the flawed update. I was working on the Folk Festival newspaper and our system was zapped by this McAfee update. I am happy that McAfee apologized, but how is that helping to get our system back up and running? Our computer has spent the day in the operating room for an update hysterectomy. It has to have the hard drive erased, the new operating system installed, and all data files and programs restored. I received a call from the computer surgeon this afternoon and he indicated that it needed to stay in Intensive Care overnight. Hopefully we will be back on line tomorrow.

Hope you guys had a great weekend and a good week thus far.