Virus on XP Pro - How to clean

Jazzycat

Hi,

regulars on this board will know that i have had a copy of XP pro that developed viruses. My main problem was that the copy of XP pro i bought turned out to be pirated so couldn't update. I dont do pirated and neither did my pc!

Financially money is tight but I bit the bullet and have purchased a 100% bone fide with COA etc etc.

Now - can anyone (esp the key advisors on here - Browntoa, Alfonso etc) advise how to install. I know I need to clean down the drive first but how?
Please give me some details and preferably not a link to another post.

As always - thanks guys!

Browntoa

are there any files you want to keep off the olfd install ??

photos documents, internet favourites or emails ??

Jazzycat

not many - my pc has 2 hard drives - the other drive is under win98.

I canmove any files to there I want to keep? or is is best to burn to cd and copy back later?

Browntoa

no it's fine to just move them to there if it has 2 disks, save burning to CD and then putting them back on later

you can back up emails if you need them by using

http://www.outlook-express-backup.com/

full working 30 day trial which will back up address books, emails and everything APART from the passwords for you eamil accounts

use your other hard disk to back up to

Browntoa

this is a pretty good guide to installing Windows with pictures

http://www.windowsxpprofessional.windowsreinstall.com/installxpcdoldhdd/indexfullpage.htm

Quincy_3

May I?

If you open Outlook Express, Tools, Accounts, Click on an Account then Export, you can save all info aswell as password.

Browntoa

if you want to wait for the others to comment before carrying on then just do your backing up for now

Browntoa

Quincy wrote:

May I?

If you open Outlook Express, Tools, Accounts, Click on an Account then Export, you can save all info aswell as password.

mmmm....other program does whole lot in one hit , identities, emails, address books etc , but if you have forgotten the passord then that will do the account part of it

Jazzycat

how about cleaning the drive?

Quincy_3

Browntoa wrote:

mmmm....other program does whole lot in one hit , identities, emails, address books etc , but if you have forgotten the passord then that will do the account part of it

I would deffo go with your suggestion it was a "just in case" offer up :beer:

niceguyrichy

Jazzycat wrote:

how about cleaning the drive?

once you've backed up all you need to back up, boot to BIOS and tell to boot from CD, insert your windows cd and reboot.

you'll get a 'press any key to boot from CD' msg, hit spacebar til the screen boot to the blue windows setup screen.

let it do it's thing (it'll check lotsa stuff) then;

follow the on-screen prompts to 'install a new version of windows', when prompted do a full format of the primary selected partition and continue to install windows. This will be a clean install and you can start over, install firewall, antivirus etc and keep it all nice and clean, and you're sorted