Question on virus/spyware removal

[Rumbarr]

Hiyas, My pc has been infected with something, more to the point someone added a authenticator to my WoW account. I'm in the process of getting my account back and was curious if I did a complete reinstall of windows vista ,will that remove the virus ? I reinstalled twice today and did a scan with windows defender and everything seems to be good .

[mjc]

Maybe...

Most of the time, yes, but depending on the infection it could be still lingering around, unless you did a 'wipe' of the hard drive before reinstalling.

[Sylvander]

1. I once had a Trojan infect my Win2000Pro OS.

2. Installed Trojan Hunter (http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=432512&sid=a098b4c27e8184b47850fe5985549e5e#432512) as advised by my Virgin ISP, and that found and eliminated it.

3.
(a) Normally I would make an image backup of my Windows partition...
When I believe it to be free of all forms of chaos [infection or whatever].
Good to do this during a new clean build of the software, when it's working as it aught.

(b) If you so much as suspect a problem...
[You might zero-fill the drive or partition, and then]...
Restore a [recently made?] image you believe to be good/clean.

4.
(a) But I wanted SOMETHING BETTER THAN WINDOWS [more secure, less liable/prone to infection?]
So I began using PUPPY LINUX [it's totally FREE :) ].
I'm typing this from Quirky-1.1->Firefox-3.6.6.
Puppy Linux has never been known to have been infected!
There has never been a confirmed report of such a thing.

(b) I might use different Puppies for different purposes.
I have 5 different Puppies, each on their own CD-RW, each with a 1GB pupsave file on one of 6-off 1.3GB [ext3] partitions on an 8GB Flash Drive.
e.g. I keep one particular Puppy for ONLINE BANKING, or buying things online. [Where a high level of security is needed]
Never use this Puppy for risky activity like fetching/opening emails, or general web-browsing.
This Puppy would be loaded from its CD-RW, with its pupsave file [holds configurations (matched to the hardware) and additionally installed packages] on its partition on the Flash-Drive-for-this-PC.
[Has no effect upon your HDD contents]
Then I set up the Puppy so it doesn't auto-save the session back to the pupsave DURING THE SESSION [I can save manually if needed]...
And CHOOSE TO NOT SAVE [or save?] the session at shut-down.
In the extremely unlikely event that the Puppy session had been hacked or infected...
It would all be lost at shut-down [if NOT-SAVE is chosen].
And it's really easy to make/restore a [clean?[]backup] copy of the pupsave file.
The contents of the optical disk [the main OS files] are un-infectable.
If you want [for any purpose] to load a guaranteed clean Puppy...
Just enter at startup, the command:
puppy pfix=ram
...And the pupsave file will be ignored [not used] for that session.

Or else you just unplug the Flash Drive prior to boot. :)

[classicsoftware]

1. I once had a Trojan infect my Win2000Pro OS.

So what. You used a tool two years ago and recommend it now. The information changes from minute to minute in this areas a and three your old old is advice is not only useless it can be dangerous.


4.(a) But I wanted SOMETHING BETTER THAN WINDOWS [more secure, less liable/prone to infection?]
So I began using PUPPY LINUX [it's totally FREE :) ].
I'm typing this from Quirky-1.1->Firefox-3.6.6.
Puppy Linux has never been known to have been infected!
There has never been a confirmed report of such a thing.

Just great, van you play WOW on Linux? I don't think so. More keen advice from one note Charlie.

Please do not post advice on malware threads. You have been asked before so I ask again. Also Linux is not a one size fits all solution.