Carpet Bombing Hard Drives

Sometimes, hard drives must be leveled.

My best friend's computer recently bit the dust. I, being somewhat computer savvy, was called in to take a look at what had gone wrong. Folks, it was not pretty.

My friend's computer was somewhat of a communal computer in that he let a lot of different people use it pretty much whenever they wanted to, and these people were not always as responsible or respectful as they should have been. Anywho, just recently, he picked up a virus that started to play merry hell with his computer.

I've patched up a few computers before, and in most every case I've seen, the computer in question just needed some love and attention. A lot of what people call a virus is actually just neglect. Too many background processes running, a cluttered registry, an overfilled hard drive, etc. All stuff that can be fixed relatively easily.

My friend's computer was something new, though. It was an honest to goodness virus. As in, rip up your computer and nom nom nom your system files into a gooey paste. (Your system files are the bits that make your computer go.)

So, after attempting a few other things totally unsuccessfully, I decided it would be easiest to just reset everything to factory settings, which meant reformatting his hard drive. That's the equivalent of carpet bombing a city and starting over. Still, he had most of his stuff backed up on an external hard drive (smart man), so starting clean will probably be for the best, even if he has to go and redownload some programs and such.

Now, time for a little promotion. If you don't have an antivirus, you should. I highly recommend AVG Free... it's user friendly, lightweight (unlike many of the big name antivirus programs out there), and effective. If you don't want to install it, talk to me, and I'll do it for you. Computers that are at risk or under lots of abuse cry out to me to be fixed, and knowing that they're happy when I'm through with them is all the reward I need. Oh yeah, I'm a nerd.