computer guru's!

[cdotson86]

Hello all,
Any help would be greatly appriciated. I currently have a Acer with windows vista. I downloaded some music (which I will never do again) and ever since on startup the computer goes blank for about 4 min. and then boots up. once on, it works as normal. So- I used the recovery disk and reinstalled windows. I think. I used the cd's and returned everything to factory default, but it never asked for the product key or anything. Did I do something wrong? Even after the reinstall it still went blank at startup. My computer is under warrentee so I took it to Best Buy and let the geek squad take a look at it. Evidently I still have 25 viruses on it. arrrg. They wanted to charge way too much so I got my computer back. Any help is greatly appriciated!!

 

[mjonesjr]

You need to reformat the hard drive to eliminate most viruses.

 

[cdotson86]

How do you reformat? Thats what I thought I did with the recovery disk? Can i use the burnt recovery disk to reformat?

 

[fastpakr]

There are a number of free CD iso's online that you can burn and then boot to, allowing you to do a virus scan when none of the normal OS is loaded. That's the best way to clear this crap off without resorting to a full rebuild.

 

[cdotson86]

hmmm.... does anyone have any links to this? Is "the ultimate boot cd" one of these? Thanks so very much!

 

[97RangerXLT]

Find another computer that is virus free. remove the harddrive from your computer and put it in a slave position on the other computer. run the virus checker on your drive and wipe the viruses out.

That is the easiest way...

you can also try to run an online virus scanner such as Trend Micro's housecall.

when you run it, run it in safe mode.

Do you have your restore partition set up on dvd's? If you do, wipe the drive and low level format it, including the restore partition. then before you high level format it, power it off completely. restart and restore the computer from your dvds.

And if this does apply: for the love of God... QUIT USING INTERNET EXPLORER!!

As for downloading music, only go to sites you know are good... do not use Limewire or bearshare. and run each file through the virus check program before opening it!

Use a good antivirus such as AVG free or Avast!. both of these are free downloads and are much better than Norton or McAfee.

Good luck!

 

[fastpakr]

http://www.techmixer.com/bitdefender-rescue-cd-with-auto-update-virus-definition-features/

 

[superdave1984]

Go here, follow the directions, virus problem solved.
http://www.osiris-spywareguide.com/

The screen going black sounds like a corrupt driver.