Having a partition of important files is a help, but is it enough? Are you sure a virus would be limited to only the C:\ drive? What if the drive electromechanically fails? Everything would be lost. If you have an external image or clone hard drive, no kind or corruption nor hard drive failure would keep you out of action for longer than it takes to "restore"... 15 minutes or less? Longer if you had to run down to BB and get a replacement drive, of course. No form of backup is truly safe unless it is physically disconnected from the computer. (And if you were truly anal, you'd have a backup off site in case of theft or fire.)
this wikipedia article says onscreen keyboards are not much use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystroke_logging I've recently come to realize how ridiculous this windows security thing is. I'm still working out details of the trading automation but once it's up and running I'm going to only operate windows behind a firewall that allows only broker url's, otherwise, forget it, no windows machines on the internet ever, might as well stop locking my car and house if I'm going to do that... windows just did security wrong from the very start, they do it with protection levels and permissions and whatnot, too easy to code in the stuff that allows hackers. Unix, linux, mac os, they protect programs by where they are located in memory, much much less opportunity to screw up the code and let hackers in...
I agree with you, I have an extra drive but this acronis software looks like what i've been looking for...
gnome, so you can use this utility instead of doing a regular format? What is the difference? Thanks for any information.
It gets high marks from users... I've had it for several years... haven't had a failure yet.... saved my bacon more than a few times. I recently had a weird mouse failure... swapped mice, changed mouse drivers.. nothing helped. (Apparently something in the mouse handling code of Windows had become corrupted.) I had to go back to an Acronis image which was 9 months old... took me about 20 minutes to restore and update all programs.. good to go once again.
Actually, you do both. The low level format is to assure the Master Boot Record is overwritten. Then do a regular Windows XP format (which is a "high level" format) during the fresh install. You wouldn't need a low level format each time you do a fresh OS install.. but it's a good idea when you've had a virus corruption and you're doing a fresh OS install.
update: I'm in the process of backing up about 27gb to the new HD right now. Should be done in about 1/2 hour. I'm seriously debating whether to give virus removal one more shot, because basically right now everything is set up to perfection and works flawlessly. And there is a solution posted on the TrendMicro website, it's just that it's a bit over my head and I'd need to find an expert to really get the job done. So we'll see. With the re-install route, I'm just a bit concerned about relocating all the right drivers, the multiple monitor setup, password and registration issues, etc. ... Anyway, thanks again to all who posted tips and suggestions. I guess there are a few class acts around this place after all.
tomahawk: TROJ_AGENT.DQI is a Trend Micro identification only judging by so few google results, it may be known by another name and there may be alternate removal methods, however you could ask for assistance here: http://www.castlecops.com/