It's the end of the world as we know it

Okay, so for whatever reason, I've been having a lot of trouble with spam comments on a few LJ posts for the last few days. A couple posts in particular have been inundated with anonymous spam comments about Xanax. I don't really want to disable anonymous commenting, so I'm going to try disabling comments on those particular entries, and see if that helps. They're mostly older ones, so I don't think it'll be an issue.

I've actually, officially started school now. It's going all right so far, though I don't think I have a realistic idea of the amount of work involved yet, as we have no homework assigned yet except for some reading. The reading's going well enough.

I was scared because one of my professors has a lot of negative ratings on ratemyprofessors.com. I don't actually trust that site much, but still. After seeing him in action a little bit, I get the impression he just has very high standards of his students, which is all right because it seems borne of a genuine interest in the subject and a desire to see his students do well and learn, which is a good thing. I find that "tough" professors are rewarding as long as they're good teachers and willing to help. So I'm carefully optimistic.

I'm worried about hurricane Irene, mainly the possibility of losing power. That would really suck.

What also sucks is that I'm still having computer issues. Now, Microsoft Office has like, disappeared. I can't open Word and as far as I can tell, Powerpoint and Excel aren't even on the computer. I did some Google searches, and I found a post on Microsoft's support forum from a gal having the exact same problem, and it appeared to be possibly connected to, yes, Windows Update. The same Windows Update that's been giving me grief since June. At this point, it doesn't seem to just be .Net Framework 4. But I'll be damned if I can trace the root of the problem. I looked under system restore to see if I could roll back to an older restore point, but the earliest point is from a week ago. I would need to go back to early June. My mom has suggested I use the recovery disk and revert to factory settings. This is...unappealing and feels like it might be overkill. At the same time, it feels like attacking the individual issues isn't doing much. I'd thought I'd fixed the .Net Framework 4 thing, but there are still two updates that won't install, and now there's this thing with Word disappearing.

I still need to put in some major work on my Inception Big Bang fic. I'm not too worried about it because I'm in brainstorming mode and have the idea all worked out and started. I don't really want to focus complete energy on it until I finish the WIP I'm completing now. I'm hoping being in school, while drastically cutting my free time, will also put me in a productive frame of mind that will ultimately help my writing. It's worked in the past.

Having a spot of computer trouble at the moment, though I think it's getting resolved (I hope!). It wasn't responding or loading anything, and I had to unplug it to get it to restart. Then it started doing a disk cleanup to get rid of corrupted files. And then it was still funky.

I see two possibilities:

1) It has something to do with the issue I'm having with Windows update, where it says it's installing updates when I shut down my computer, but never actually finishes/freezes up/who knows what. That had happened again just prior to this problem.

2) It has something to do with the Firefox update I downloaded this afternoon.

I'm leaning towards the latter. When I first restarted, the computer was behaving well enough until I tried opening Firefox. And it seems to be doing fine now that I've uninstalled it. But I'm running a virus scan too just in case, and I'm trying to find a solution to the Windows Update problem, because even if that's not what fucked things up, I should probably still try to get it working right.

In the meantime, I have a browser dilemma. I've been using Firefox for a few years now, and I've grown quite fond of it. For one thing, I never realized how much I took adblock for granted. I'm on Chrome now and am amazed to actually see these ads on LJ I've heard people mention.

So, do I:

1) Try to get Firefox back, maybe an earlier version.
2) Try out Chrome some more (it looks okay, but I'm finding it tricky to figure out).
3) Use Internet Explorer (which I hate. But maybe if I use it more, I'll see some actual advantages to it?).
4) Go back to using MSN Explorer (which I like better than IE, but not by much. Pro is that I can easily access my MSN email).