No, seriously. Literally, by itself. My wife is out of town, I’m the only one here, we have a one bedroom-New York-small-but-expensive apartment, and my computer speakers were turned up because I had been listening to a CD on it about four hours ago.
All of a sudden, from the other room, I hear a really loud phone dialing. I race into the bedroom and my computer is dialing into the internet! And the dialogue box was on-screen too, the one that comes up when you double-click the shortcut icon to the ISP. I hit “Cancel” and grabbed a rosary.
I just bought the computer last week… my old computer never did anything like that… is there some kind of setting that I need to turn off?? It freaked me out, man.
If you’ve got a windows box, go to your Control Panel, open Internet Options, click the Connections tab, and click the Never Dial a Connection option. Then click OK. Chances are you’ve got something trying to get updates automatically, or check mail or something like that. On the off chance that it’s some piece of malware trying to dial home, I’d recommend dowloading, updating and running Adaware and Spybot Search & Destroy.
I tried what you suggested, Q.E.D., but it was already on “Never…”. I’ll run SpyHunter tonight, and check to see if it happens around the same time of evening (about 11:30) tonight.
Other than that, I dunno what the hell it is. All I could think of was that scene in WarGames where the military guy is like, “David, computers don’t call people.” and Matthew Broderick says, “Yours did.”. Hopefully I don’t start World War III.
Just for the record, I’m using Steve Case’s great contribution to American culture, AOL. On irregular occasions where I’ve been online and haven’t signed off to go eat, talk to Barb, use the bathroom, or otherwise do something not involving keyboard and monitor, we’ll hear it dialing up – meaning that AOL has dropped connection and it’s trying to recover it. Startling the first few times you have it happen!
