Reformatting Main Drive - Will I lose

[Malgor]

I finally had to throw in the towel this morning when after I uninstalled and reinstalled my virus protection, it blue screened about 10 times in a row and wouldn't reboot. After two hours of trying to get it to boot up it finally did. I backed everything up on an external HD and called the computer geeks to come haul it away. They have special diagnostic tools to hook it up to and see what hardware problems I'm having and see if they can resolve them as well as the blue screen of death.

I called around to try and get pricing and time frame from several of the local "fix it" places, and some of it was absurd. Like for example: Me: "How long will you take to fix it?" Them: "1 1/2 to 2 hours at 45 dollars an hour." Me: "Okay so I can drop it off today and pick it up tomorrow?" Them: "No we usually take 3 to 4 days to get it back to you." Me: "$#%)$".

[Sam DeathWalker]

Use arconicos truehome 11 to CLONE your hard drive every few weeks.

Dont use ANY anti virus.

(just don't click on email attachments go to sites that you don't know and when you get the message "blah blah wants to check your computer for blah blah" hit alt del shift and close expoler right away, don't click yes or no, just close out of ie explorer immediatly) and shut off all remote services. If you understand how crap gets on your computer in the first place then you don't have to worry about stupid norton hogging all yur cpu. And if you do get something then you have your clone from a week ago anyways.

If your computer goes down, take out the current hard drive and plug in the clone; less then 5 mintues if you have a TT Shark like I do.

Bingo back in business.

I'v been running computers for years and years and havn't lost one due to virus or malware etc. yet. but 20 people will say get norton and start talking about root kits and ...... Win 7 is very robust you can't really do much without getting around all that admin stuffs. If you see a web site with a stupid name of all numbers and letters then you just should not be there.

[MiRai]

Use arconicos truehome 11 to CLONE your hard drive every few weeks.

*cough*Acronis*cough*

Dont use ANY anti virus.

You can't recommend that -- MS Security Essentials is completely free of charge with Windows 7. When people need to
feed their dark side something like this can help keep almost anything out. If someone has designed a virus that they
want to get into your system they'll get it there, but for browsing the internet and doing normal random shit... you should
run one.

(just don't click on email attachments go to sites that you don't know and when you get the message "blah blah wants to check your computer for blah blah" hit alt del shift and close expoler right away, don't click yes or no, just close out of ie explorer immediatly) and shut off all remote services. If you understand how crap gets on your computer in the first place then you don't have to worry about stupid norton hogging all yur cpu. And if you do get something then you have your clone from a week ago anyways.

Ah, the fine print. Seeing as he had to let a computer shop take care of it (no offense Malgor), I think it's safer to
recommend an AV program. MSSE didn't hog anything even while running my Q9550, it's a nice quiet program that
hangs out with you while you're online.

I will agree that other AV programs can be intrusive and demanding but in the past year(?) I've been using MSSE it's
been great to me and I've visited some pretty crazy websites.

Fenril is a freak.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Ya I supposed if you are inclinded to use one then use the MS one.

Still my recomendation is to use none but as stated everyone else will resonably advise the oppostite.

I really don't understand why Win 7 dosn't come will all remote services disabled as the default .......

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Ya I supposed if you are inclinded to use one then use the MS one.

Still my recomendation is to use none but as stated everyone else will resonably advise the oppostite.

I really don't understand why Win 7 dosn't come will all remote services disabled as the default .......

For the same reason no computers come with a firewall installed in whitelisted-apps-only mode: because the average joe doesn't know enough about computers to make educated decisions about which programs to allow, etc.

Also, it really doesn't much matter what AV suite you use as long as you use something. AS studies have shown, none of them are 100% perfect and most are well under 90% detection rates but almost all of them have at least basic detection for the top few hundred nasty, active and in-the-wild malware. It's like recommending people not go into a warzone with kevlar and a flak jacket because you really should know not to walk where bullets are flying. Really? /rolleyes

[Sam DeathWalker]

I'v been avoiding virus since the 8088 pc ....

DOn't forget I do suggest a back up clone drive in case you do get a virus. And by the way, I belive that cloneing is how a lot of large companies deal with the problem as well.

If you did know the path of every bullet on the battlefield then you don't need the jacket. Shuting down remote services just instantly kills a ton of virus as probably most of them rely upon remote services.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Except for all the javascript, flash, pdfreader, cross-site-scripting and other stuff that is prevalent today, which all happens as a result of a user-initiated action, not an open port. Also, if you got a drive-by virus from one of the ad-rotation injection attacks on a web browser you left open before you went to bed, it could be sitting there collecting documents/passwords/etc. and infecting other machines on your LAN all night long. By the time you clone your hard drive from the good image, the damage is mostly already done.

[Malgor]

The on-going computer saga continues!

So, as we last left our hero, Malgor, I had taken my computer to a shop. The reason I picked this particular shop was two-fold. First they have Geeks and Nerds in their names, and how could you go wrong there? Second, they promised a 24 hour turn around where other shops only said 3-5 days.

The Good: My computer is home. It now recognizes the DVD/CD rom again.

The Bad: It still took exactly 57 hours to get it back from the shop. On top of that (since they delivered it) they forgot my windows install disk back at their shop.

The Ugly: They couldn't find anything wrong with it in their devices scans, all were working properly, or so their detector told them. They didn't discover anything in the 12+ hours of virus scans they ran on the machine (I told them they wouldn't since I use it just for gaming). They then wanted to run another 12 hours of registry tests, and that's where I drew the line and said, if you can get the DVD enabled in the bios, just reinstall windows and I'll reinstall my programs. They did that, but now we're talking 57 hours total away from my house.

So after I get it home I just plug in a few things so I don't stress it out too much when I'm reinstalling stuff: Monitor - 1 to start with, keyboard, mouse, and speakers. It does fine and installs all of those drivers. It then tells me I need to update windows, so I set it to doing that. When that's finished, and before I restarted I did as suggested and downloaded Microsoft Security Essentials. Then rebooted.

On the reboot as it's booting back up, BLUE SCREEN. So I'm back to square one, or actually square two since I do have my DVD drive working again. I assume though, that will disappear again if the blue screens persist. I am perfectly convinced now that the blue screens have everything to do with the Microsoft Update.

Time to start saving for a new computer I guess, since I'm all saga'd out.

Thanks again for everyone helping out.

It's nice to know that everyone here is willing to lend a hand when one of us is in trouble.

Malgor


Edit 1: Strange. After that initial blue screen on start up after installing the windows update, I haven't had one since. I've reinstalled most of my programs, done a couple more windows updates and nothing is wrong so far. I even worked on my all mage team for awhile getting the to L51.

Edit 2: 4 days later... Windows wants to do another update, I let it and guess what? Blue screens again. So many that I can only get the damn thing to load fully one in ten times. Then it blue screens while I'm trying to restore back to a few days back! POS!!!! Oh well. I may reinstall windows myself this time. I may pull the RAM as sam says below and see if that does anything.

[Sam DeathWalker]

9 times out of 10 its bad ram when you get errors that do not exactly repeat.