Virus 3

A2Free died on me. Three crash windows were up when I checked on it. Oh well, I hoped the other apps did their job.

Next, I ran McAfee Stinger then some other random utilities (EZPcFix,  RootKitty) which I had no idea how they worked; the UIs on some of these free tools is a bit cryptic.

Looking at the rest of the utilities on UBCD4Win didn't seem like there was much else useful to run, so I held my breath and rebooted using my hard drive.

Everything looks ok; I can get to the anti-virus web pages now and can run anti spyware/virus utils without them locking up. I'm guessing this means I'm virus free once again.

So, on to the next task of installing Win7. See my next post for that.

Future Topics

Here are some of the things I plan on doing and discussing here:

• Fix virus on PC
• Install Windows 7
• Overclock the PC
• Convert CDs to FLAC & MP3
• Essential apps for my PC
• Backup PC
• Buy external drive
• GMail backup
• Get my home theater working
• Install Win7 to my netbook - Is this even a good idea?

New OS Installation - Background

So, I mentioned that I plan on installing Win7 pretty soon. First, for purely "never give up" reasons, I'm trying to fix this virus I currently have. Once that's done with I want to move to Win7 64-bit.

Of course I'm going to do a clean install. So, no big deal, I've installed it at work a small handful of times already; it's a simple smooth install. Why bother blogging about it?

Because I am unable to just do things the simple way. Customization is my middle name.

When I built this PC (back in Jan '07) I wanted faster application response. After reading many articles, I decided the best (with limited budget) way to do this was to have one fast drive as the boot drive (WD Raptor 74GB, 10k rpm) and a bigger, but slower drive to hold data (Seagate Barracuda 400GB 7.2k rpm). (This was the best one could do in the pre SSD days without hassling with RAID.)

After using it for two years it doesn't really seem to have paid off. I still have to wait agonizingly long for the PC to finish booting and to launch new app, and especially to switch between users. This may be the infamous Windows cruft that accumulates after three years of use and installing too many utility apps.

Nonetheless, for my Win7 upgrade I'm going to do it again.

On XP I never did manage to completely get all the user data over onto the data drive. Unlike linux where you can specify which partition to use for the various root level folders, Windows gives you no such opportunity to say that you want "Documents & Settings" on the D: drive. The best I did, after the users were created, was to move the "My Documents" location for everybody. Really that's 90% good enough. However you do end up with the odd scenario where you drag a file from "My Photos" onto your desktop and it does a copy instead of a move.

With Win7 I want to do this right from the installation, not as an after fact.

I also want to have the page file and the hibernate file on a different logical drive/partition formatted with FAT32 vs the OS partition as NTFS.

to be continued...

Virus 2

That night I come home and my wife tells me that the PC is effed up again. I went upstairs and it was locked up. Reboot and it's much the same situation as before. This time I notice in the registry that there's stuff with "extrac64_cab.exe" and "winhlp64.exe"

I'm running Win XP Sp3 32-bit, so any file that implies it's for a 64-bit OS is lying on my machine. Crap. More viruses to get rid of.

I do the same stuff as yesterday: safe mode, run Mbam which locks after a while, run SpyBot which locks after a while. Now I'm starting to get royally effed by this/these virus/malware apps.

At work the next day, I made a bootable CD using UBCD4Win. (Which I ended up using at work to help my boss reset the Admin password on an old PC we were reusing.)

That night I started my PC up using that boot CD and ran Mbam, SpyBot and A2Free.

We'll see how that's going when I get home tonight.

Virus!

My home PC has become infected with a virus, "Malware Defense". Being a manly man and all I don't run an active virus scanner; slows down the computer too much and I know better so as to not get a virus. Crap!

Maybe it's better classified as malware, not a virus (obvious from it's name, no?). It doesn't seem to do anything much to affect my daily activities (email, surfing, flash games). What it does is prevent/redirect my browser (chrome) from displaying any anti-virus/spyware pages.

Fortunately, I have a netbook in the house (Asus Eee PC 900A), so I used that to go to the removal pages and download a few tools (Malwarebytes Anti-Malware).

My home PC is still running Windows XP (currently prepping it to move to Win7, but that's a future post). I booted into safe mode, removed a bunch of reg entries manually (following those listed on the removal page), ran the Mbam tool and all looked good.

I rebooted and it looked ok; I could hit those web pages. So, that was that for the night.