Scams and crashes

Here's a strange co-incidence for you... I made my last payment on my Dell laptop this week (yes, I was very stupid by paying for it over three years... I've learned many lessons in finance since then) and then suddenly the day before yesterday, I received one of those blue screens with a kernal error or whatever... I've seen the screen before a few times at work, but never on my laptop. I had one hell of a time re-starting after that. That night I forgot to shut it down because I wasn't feeling well and pretty much left everything on as it was. Then yesterday, the fan went into crazy overdrive and scared the hell out of Julie who was home during the day. She did not know that she could just hold the power button down until it turned off so she propped my laptop up on coasters to get more air flow under it. I came home to it sounding like it was going to lift off the desk and fly away. I had a hell of a time shutting it off - it had some sort of Microsoft error and I ended up having to hold the power button down to get it to shut down. I didn't touch it for the rest of the night.

This morning I turned on my laptop to check if I had been paid today. It took a million years to boot up and then was sooooo sluggish once I tried doing anything. I managed to finally open a web browser and check my bank account - what do I find? My credit card has three charges on it from the past week that I never made. I also had a charge from a company once a month since August that I somehow never picked up on. Needless to say, I was late for work this morning. Julie called the number of the company that was charging my credit card and they immediately apologized and said they would stop charging - they asked no questions about why or anything. The other charges, we looked up and saw they were scams. I called the credit card company from work and put in a fraud claim. They've put a hold on my card and will be issuing me a new one. Apparently the investigation takes about six weeks at which time I should see the money back on my account on the next statement.

I also logged onto my online banking at work and changed my password and security questions for good measure.

So... my computer is still a little sluggish but Norton 360 can't seem to find anything wrong. I'm not sure if my computer has just decided to show it's age on the week I've finally paid it off (the fan is on again, not as loud though), or if I've been hacked or have a virus or worm or something.

Happy freakin' New Year's Eve to me...