Having somehow managing to completely muck up my desktop in the process of trying to remove some particularly nasty malware, I have finally been told that the blessed replacement is shipping. So… just as soon as I get it I can stop with this ad hoc, jury-rigged back-and-forth between the laptop and the netbook. Of course, I’m going to need to get all of my stored files – both the creative writing material and the game saves – out of the hard drive without infecting my new system, but one step at a time.
I should also probably buy both an external hard drive for the computer, and an external CD-ROM drive for the netbook. Suggestions?
Moe Lane
PS: I also look forward to playing Dragon Age: Origins
I got a decent ASUS external DVD drive for my M11x – around $52 at Amazon.
Is the *data* on your old computer’s HD ok?
If so, get a hard drive enclosure and put the old HD into that. Boom, access to everyhting on it plus an external drive for backups later.
I assume so, Neil. But it’s, well, infected with malware. Malware that I couldn’t purge.
Suggest Carbonite. Awesome.
Moe, most of the time malware sets itself to run automagically via registry keys. There are probably a couple of dozen different places that you can set something to run, and they usually set themselves to run in several different ways, so when you fix one, if you don’t get them all it will undo your fixes. That’s what makes it so darn difficult to fix. It usually is easier to reformat and reinstall than to fix manually, if things like ad-aware, etc., don’t manage to fix it. I’m stubborn, so when I’ve gotten hit with something I always go ahead and fix it, but there are times I’ve spent many more hours repairing things than it would have taken to reinstall.
But the good news is that your data is almost certainly ok, so if you put the drive in an enclosure and do a virus scan from another PC, you should be just fine. The kinds of things that can infect data files (usually, but not only, word document files), the virus scanners are very good at picking it up.