Guys, be careful who you download stuff from. Recently, we got a trojan horse virus on our computer. We have no clue how but we did.

We pulled out the arsenal of virus scans. Nothing would get rid of this virus because it was part of the windows running system. Finally, my dad called the company of one of our virus scan programs and he had him take out some files that my dad knew he shouldn't have taken out but he did anyways because of the "expert".

Anyways, total melt down. First the computer would turn on but it wouldn't boot up. Finally it did but in safe mode. We tried everything to save our mechanical friend but it came down to the big format. My dad has a reasonable sized hard drive, a little over 8 gigs. Big enough for us. Our first computer didn't have a hard drive and the one after that only had 20 megs.

Anyways, this message is to all you people. BE CAREFUL!

BTW, I think I found the true meaning of the term "plug and play" First you plug it in. Then you play with it for an hour trying to get it to work :)

Actually, we cal it Microsoft's "Plug and Pray". Fortunately, it's about 80% reliable after being out for 5 years...

For those of you that don't have anti-virus software on your home & work machines: It is an absolute must to have one the automatically updates every few days. I manage Norton Corporate Edition to 300 workstations and 15 servers at work. Every machine is updated nightly automatically. This prevents about 95% of the viruses from infecting my machines. Some of the newest viruses might still get by but it is still the best system out there...

plug and pray...heheheh...i thought that all OS's were supposed to crash several times a day for no reason...;) ;)

Actually, IBM had the first real PNP. The Micro Channel bus was true PNP on the hardware level! It didn't rely on OS drivers to configure. And was much faster than the classic AT bus.

But IBM tried to be too proprietary about it. They felt they lost the PC market to clones and didn't want to loose the Micro Channel too. But no one would pay the huge fees just to sign the non-disclosure forms so the idea, good as it was, died.

i thought that all OS's were supposed to crash several times a day for no reason...

Nope - just Microsoft stuff. I have Linux servers and Novell servers runinng for almost a year that I've needed to bring down and restart purely for maintenance issues, not crashing... At one time, Microsoft considered 1.5 events (crashes, lockups, lost printers and drive mappings, BSOD - Blue Screen Of Death) per day normal operation. I don't know what is considered normal now...

For all of you fellow geeks, here is an example (not to be duplicated on a MS product) from earlier this year before maintenace was performed - just look at the second line "uptime" (MS products don't have those categories easily seen - I think you need a third party product for that):

Be carefull everyone, the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs virus was back in my E-mail last week.

I would actually like to try Linux but all our stuff is Windows. I don't know if it would be compatible or what. The sound card is STILL not working. We have a Soundblaster something. It will play Midis but not wavs. Something is up. We think we are going to format it AGAIN. Also, the scanner can't be found or something.

"Computers don't make errors, what they do, they do on purpose." - Dale from King of the Hill.

All I can say is back up your files. Luckily, I backed up all my important buying lists, pictures, and zip files on the zip drive.