thanks, we live on a busy county lake road which is paved, i believe the lines are buried. i know like i said that on the other side of the road they get cable, and our neighbors who live just east of us get it as well, so we are borderline on it all, although i have to say i don't know of anyone who has cable internet, just the tv service ut i could be wrong. Our provider is just a very small town company who sells computers and internet service, phones and phone service, and DirecTv so it isn't a large company that anyone would recognize the name or anything. My mom only lives 15 miles from me and she gets comcast so i need to check on that. i did check on satellite internet last night and didn't think the speed or price was any better than what i have now, and we have issues here with our satellite signal going out in bad weather even though it says it has 99.9 % strength. I have also checked with alltel and verizon in the past, and although their upload speeds sound impressive, the people i know who have their service hate it and have a lot of outages. So basically i just need to call Monday and see what my options are i guess. I appreciate all the advice and help. I am spending my day today researching routers and trying to figure our which one i should get and i am wondering if the transmission speeds noted on these have anything to do with how it will affect my internet speed. i am so tired of reading reviews and specs and need to just make a decision already because i have already spent way too much time on this, but there definitely does not seem to be one that has all good reviews, i just do not want to get something that will slow me down even worse if there is such a thing.

If this comes up again, can you give us the exact wording of the message that you got? If you can also tell us exactly what you were doing at the time it might help. If it's telling you the connection will shut down, it's entirely possible that even though you were "doing something" at the time, if you had been reading a news article or something, although you were doing something from your perspective, you weren't doing anything from the standpoint of the internet connection. When you view a web page, you download the page and the connection closes. It doesn't open again until you click a link, send an email, etc. One thing you can do to keep the connection alive is to set your email program to check for new mail more often. Each time it checks, that's activity and resets the time.

The main thing you can do is exercise good judgment. What was sent to you was spam, not malware, and there is no program that is going to intercept all spam, especially when it comes from a friend. Now, if it had included an attachment that was some form of malware, and you opened or downloaded it, hopefully your antivirus would have caught it...or it might not have. There are no absolute guarantees with this kind of stuff. Keep your Avast up-to-date and run Malwarebytes and SuperAntispyware regularly.

Corrine they fixed it right away, the day we were discussing it I did go with firefox and right up at the top a banner opened which was one that looked like it could be the download for malwarebytes. I know the actual download button is the blue one but for some it could have been confusing.(And I do have adblock plus and easylist) But I have to say it was not there long, it was not there when I originally posted the link but shortly after apparently it appeared, I was able to see it only once then it was completely gone. I know the bleepingcomputer team would not willingly want that kind of confusion and they apparently took care of it. Bleeping computer is so huge I know it has to be a big cost and also a lot of work to make sure everything is as it should be!