PC disease diagnosis needed!
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yikes, re-installing the OS is a major pain in the butt and usually not necessary to fix PC problems. One effective way of discouraging hackers is to setup am account to access windows and have it password protected. Then change the password every day. It's a little job, but it really messes with the hackers ;) Another way is to not have your computer online all the time. If you are set on scanning, try the spybot search&destroy engine. It's pretty good, and it does effectively remove a lot of hacker hooks, so running it every day can really cut down on unwanted code running on your pc.
Not really: for me it's about 1/2 hour, plus updates to apply - I create a clean image when first installed with all needed apps, and that's how long it takes to do a test restore. It helps if you keep all data on a different drive as well ... Virus, malware, hardware failure, ransomware: stuff the lot and reload clean!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Not really: for me it's about 1/2 hour, plus updates to apply - I create a clean image when first installed with all needed apps, and that's how long it takes to do a test restore. It helps if you keep all data on a different drive as well ... Virus, malware, hardware failure, ransomware: stuff the lot and reload clean!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
The problem with that approach is that you then have a computer with an out-dated build online updating which makes it highly vulnerable to bots looking for computers that insecure to attack. The only way to keep that remotely secure is to have a windows cd you can fresh install from and all the updates on dvd or something so that you can install them all while the computer is kept offline until it's security build is fully up to date. That is a tricky measure to implement since you tend to only download what you need for your hardware build, so if that changes, all the updates that go with that new build are now slightly different than they were for the old build. In other words, the most secure ways of re-staging a PC can get pretty complicated over time. You are very correct about having the data on a different drive. I have never regretted doing that.
