OT - Cry for Help (At the Mercy of Viruses/Spyware)

[amalventano at sc.rr.com (Allyn)]

> 2.)
> The 2nd way is more expensive, but is the way you can save all of your
> data if you are your own computer support.
>
> Get a new hard dirve, exchange it w/ your present hard drive, either
> install windows onto that hard drive or use the manufacturers recovery
> disk to image the drive. After windows is installed, install AV of your
> choice and update both windows and the AV ntil they says there are no more
> updates to apply.
>
> THEN install your original drive as a slave in the system and scan your
> old drive w/ the new OS and AV install.

there is a way to do this involving no cost actually. you can use a program 
called 'partition magix' to resize the c partition so its smaller, then you 
can make a second primary partition after it, make that partition acitve, 
and re-install windows on that one. once you are in a clean windows install, 
you can install antivirus software and scan the other partition. its 
essentially the same as doing the operation with 2 seperate drives.

at the end of my drive i always keep a 2 gig partition with a clean windows 
install and some recovery tools. fixing almost any weird problems involves 
nothing more that switching over to that partition. that way you dont have 
to worry about silly stuff like 'system files in use' or anything of the 
like.

p.s. partition magic can be found in various 'shady' places on the net... 
(or just search for 'partition' at http://www.filemirrors.com/ - you want 
8.0 or higher).

hth
Al