I recently helped some non-tech-savvy friends restore their computer. There were some hard drive issues (couldn’t boot…couldn’t see files when booting to diagnostic disk)…serious stuff. I took it to a friends house and slaved it to another xp install (I don’t have one at home…macs here) and, to my suprise, upon booting…before getting to the windows screen/loging in/etc, windows told me the drive was screwed up and that it would go ahead and fix it. We thought “what the hell, go ahead.” And it did. Booted up and was able to see the files on the slaved drive just fine. Swapped the drives again and was able to successfully boot. Then we put on adaware and spybot and found tons and tons of stuff: 1700 ‘critical entries’ found by adaware and 200 programs found by spybot. WOW. So, I’ve put together the following set of instructions for them:
- Install Firefox - never use any other browser unless you have to (some sites may not work on anything but IE).
- Get a Gmail account (gmail.com) - never use any other email accounts (ESPECIALLY those given to you by your ISP)
- Forward all the emails you want to keep to your new gmail account.
- Backup all the files you want to keep onto a CD.
- Re-Install windows and other software (including norton or other virus protection software). DO NOT INSTALL THE SBC SOFTWARE
- Connect to the internet
- Disable norton live protect (complains about changing system files on the next step)
- Go to Windows Update (from the start menu)
- Install all the updates and reboot (some need to be done individually…it will tell you)
- Repeat previous 3 steps until all updates are installed
- Re-Enable live-protect (if not on)
- Install Firefox browser
- Install adaware and spybot (search google for them…yes from firefox)
- Run adaware (do this regularly…at least every couple weeks)
- Run spybot (do this regularly…at least every couple weeks)
- Never use the power button to turn your computer off…tell windows to shutdown and it will turn off after making sure all is well
