I fixed my wife's computer and am willing to help others

[Chuckt]

About two years ago my wife’s computer was hit by some kind of malware. Norton scanned the computer for an hour and didn’t find anything. I used another program and it ended up getting rid of the virus but then when I re-booted, I found that I destroyed Windows by destroying the virus. I got the computer back up but a technician thought that the hard drive was going bad. Some of the Microsoft updates helped the computer by getting some of the malware out.

Because we were busy and needed it for work, I never really had a chance to fix the computer. It was painfully slow booting up. It took 15 minutes to half an hour to start up and then some of the updates reduced that time. But there were problems with the computer freezing when it came off of “stand by” and sometimes the computer would operate really slow and just freeze.

We kept getting reinfected apart from my backups and I kept scanning the computer and removing the malware. I finally had some free time before New Year ’s Eve when we had a registry error. Removing and reinstalling the wireless software didn’t fix the problem so I used the service tag to order myself a new hard drive and it happened to be bigger. After I backed up my important files, I opened the case, grounded myself from static electricity and removed two connectors to the sata hard drive. I rolled it out and replaced the drive. I vacuumed out the computer of dust and used the emergency disks that come with the computer; I reinstalled the operating system. I also removed and replaced the cell battery but you have to be careful in doing this because if it doesn’t have enough of a charge then your computer won’t start up and I do this for a reason and from experience. I used a second computer to download the drivers and there are really only four drivers that I need but I was careful and read every one before installing. The drivers are .exe files and all I had to do is double click on them to install them.

The computer seems to be faster than it has ever been. It may be the updated drivers were more efficient ones. It may be because I had a bad hard drive.

I ordered a sata case for the old hard drive and it works. Before it came, I needed to get some of my wife’s email addresses off of the old computer's operating system. Putting the old hard drive back in allowed me to boot the old computer and salvage the old email addresses. My sata hard drive enclosure came and I copied some other files off of the old hard drive.

Fixing your computer is sometimes a process of elimination. I’ve had service technicians only take my money just to snoop through my computer and not really fix anything. I’ve talked to other techs and I also know where to get free support.

I’m happy. I’m happy with myself because I’m showing you that it isn’t always that hard to fix your computer. I saved us money that we didn’t have. Sometimes fixing your computer is cheaper than buying a new computer. Hopefully we can get another couple of years out of it.

Disclaimer: Make safety a priority. Make sure the power cord is disconnected and don't touch any of the circuits. Ground yourself and protect against static electricity. Also, back up any data and know beforehand what drivers you need to fix your computer. It is even good to take a digital picture of how things were before you touched them. Give yourself about 4 hours or more and two or more sittings.

[Pat-uk]

A really good tool to have on hand when your PC has been infected with somthing nasty is called ComboFix, I do quite alot of PC repairs, mostly due to virus atacks and I use it first before doing anything else.

This pretty much kills off anything including rootkit atacks and other things that will generally block your normal antivirus from working properly. it installs the microsoft windows recovery console and uses that to fix your PC.

it's a free tool and you can Download it from bleepingcomputer http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/combofi ... e-combofix and a few others but some other sites like combofix.org try to charge you for it, and when you run combofix it actually tells you NOT TO DOWNLOAD IT FROM combofix.org as they are nothing to do with it.

If your PC is running slowly, doesn't seem to update the OS or antivirus properly, it will be worth downloading it and giving it a try, it produces a really good report that will also help you identify other issues.

[brad]

Some great info there guys!

And sorry that you had to post it all again Chuck - the server seems to have reverted back to an older backup which deleted some of the newer posts.

And now here's my post again!

I had a situation quite a few years ago where my computer just would not start up. I pulled everything apart and put it all (well pretty much all) back together again and it worked just fine.

I then came back the next day and it would not start again. So long story short, it turns out that the computer did not like my USB memory card reader plugged in when first turned on. It was fine to use it once it had booted into windows and that is why the problem took me so long to track down!

[Chuckt]

Some great info there guys!

And sorry that you had to post it all again Chuck - the server seems to have reverted back to an older backup which deleted some of the newer posts.

I was able to improve my "rough draft" and improve my post.

I like the fact that I can install Windows on as many hard drives as I want. If my computer crashes, I can put a backup hard drive in. Everyone should find out what kind of hard drive interface they have and get a case for its size: Sata, Ide, 2.5inch, 3.5inch, etc., and buy an external case for it. When your computer crashes, you can swap hard drives and have less down time with your already installed operating system. If you were to have your computer crash with important data, you need to have something working in order to get your data back. Those of us who work, data is critical for our jobs. Paying paid tech support to get you back up without deleting your data is not something you want to do but I couldn't put the operating system back up because Dell has the operating system locked up so that hackers can't get into certain sectors (they have a copy of Windows on the hard drive for reinstalation) and it took us several tries to reinstall the operating system. Just putting the hard drive with the crashed operating system in an external case or second hard drive slot in the computer is all you need to do but you need a working computer to salvage your data in the first place.

I might also get a second hard drive just to put Linux on and see how that would boot.

[brad]

Now that you mention it, I have been quite impressed with how Apple deals with upgrading your harddrive.

If you get a larger harddrive you just connect it up via usb, you then go into disk utility (part of Mac os X) and you basically click on your current harddrive, drag it onto the new one and it copies everything over.

Once finished, you take out your old drive, put in your new one and it will perform exactly the same (except you'll have more space!)

[Chuckt]

Now that you mention it, I have been quite impressed with how Apple deals with upgrading your harddrive.

If you get a larger harddrive you just connect it up via usb, you then go into disk utility (part of Mac os X) and you basically click on your current harddrive, drag it onto the new one and it copies everything over.

Once finished, you take out your old drive, put in your new one and it will perform exactly the same (except you'll have more space!)

Have you tried to create a Hackintosh on a USB Thumb Drive?

How to Create a Portable Hackintosh on a USB Thumb Drive
http://lifehacker.com/5739259/how-to-cr ... humb-drive

[brad]

I haven't but have heard a bit about it. Apparently it can be quite hard to get some pieces of hardware to work correctly though.