PC update

Format and reinstallation of my desktop PC went swimmingly.

Dell’s OS and driver CDs helped a lot. I don’t know if they still include those disks, but they should. Made reinstallation of drivers for onboard video, Intel chipset and modem very simple.

A complete format of my hard drive was necessary because trying to repair the Windows installation had errors. I think they were malware related: setup couldn’t copy a couple of dll files from the CD to the hard drive; it had an error trying to copy over iexplore.exe too.

So I started from scratch. Besides, a full format makes me feel cleaner. :)

Right now, it’s slogging through all the downloading and installing of Windows updates.

PC maintenance

A flat piece of clay is drying in preparation for the next noun, but tonight, I’m in the process of backing up my PC to an external hard drive.

I have been dealing with two major malware infections on my desktop computer. The major components have been cleaned, but some malware has been creeping back in. For example, a search redirect: clicking on a Google search result sends me to a pharmacy web site. If I back up and click again, I get to the page I wanted.

Then this evening after a reboot, opening Firefox caused major lag and unresponsiveness. Moments later, McAfee suddenly said that I wasn’t protected. I opened it to check and found that real-time scanning was turned off. McAfee starts whenever I boot up, and I didn’t change any settings, which means something turned off McAfee’s tools right before my eyes.

That’s when I decided to drop everything and take care of this reinstallation.

Did you know that malware can actually leave “bread crumbs,” little commands that check to see if a particular malware is installed, and if not, connect to its home server to reinstall it?

For this reason, the only way to really clean everything is to repair the Windows installation.