Thursday, December 11, 2008

Up and running!

I started working on this today at 10:00 am. I started by disconcerting the power, opening the case, pulling out the DVD drive and the hard drive bays, connecting the C: and DVD drives to the motherboard and powering up the computer.

Windows began to install and asked me if I wanted to delete the partitions but wouldn't let me. so I continued the install. It too about an hour & seemed to go fine so I put the hardware back the way it was, rebooted and got an error. Did some research on it and found I STILL had the virus. GAH! So I installed a virus scanner, found and removed the problem and rebooted.... Same error.

Thankfully the site that ID the virus had instruction on how to manually remove it. I followed the instructions, rebooted and thought I was good. Nope. killing the virus messed up the install... So back to square one.

5 hours of install, resetting hardware and lots of waiting later I'm back in business.

Now I just have a few more hours of locating and installing drivers, browser add-ons, music and photo programs.......

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Stupid damned virus!

Yeah, my computer is down due to a freaking virus.

Our friend Will videoed our wedding and sent the DVD to us. Last week Carrie decided she wanted to put it on her Facebook. The only program I have to convert it didn't seem to want to work right so I began looking for something else. I found a program, downloaded and scanned it for viruses. It came up as clean so I installed it.....

17 trojans later I can't load windows because the XP Data Execution Protection kicks in and stops Windows Explorer from loading.... Now I'm having to do a reformat/reinstall.

The problem with that is I only have one IDE connector on my motherboard for the hard drives. My DVD drive is connected through an Ultra 133 controller card in a PCI slot. WinXP install doesn't like that.

So i called a computer place to see how much, $74.99. It includes a hardware diag too. Talking to the tech though I found out that I can connect the C: and the DVD to the same IDE cable. It'll be slower than if they were on separate channels but it should allow me to install. I'll be trying that tomorrow. If it doesn't work I'll have to take it in. Sigh. Merry freaking Christmas.