My laptop has been invaded by an extremely pernicious virus called the W32.Mixor!inf. It invades your computer and takes over, sending e-mails on its own, etc. Who ever wrote it is an evil genius, because apparently that sick bastard thought of everything someone would do to get rid of it. It won’t even let me install the new Norton Anti-virus 2007. Anybody dealt with this thing? Any idea on how to get rid of it short of rebuilding my hard drive? I’ve got my system recovery discs, but really don’t want to go that route unless I have to.
You’re really best off going with the Windows re-install, with drive reformat. That’s the best way, and frankly something you should do periodically anyway, just to clean out the “plaque”. Otherwise, you’ll never really be sure. Just offload your contact files, etc., and reinstall. You’ll be happy you did, believe me.
I agree with some of the other folks…just use this as an opportunity to do some house cleaning by reformatting. Your machine will run better afterward.
Here are a couple of general computer tips that I have found helpful in abstracting ones machine from thyself. Following these guidelines will make it much less disasterous when your machine dies via a virus, hardware failure or any other reason. Don’t put your stuff in My Docs. If you have a second hard drive, store all of your personal documents there under D:WhatEver. Store only your software on the C Drive if possible. That will allow you to reformat your software drive while leaving your personal stuff alone. Keep your Files and Folders organized. Don’t put stuff all over the place. It is just like any other filing cabinet, the more organized it is, the easier it is to find what you are looking for. Don’t use deep nested folder hierarchies. Keep a flat structure if possible with everything in a common root folder like D:Projects\Finance, D:Projects\Fitness, D:Projects\Music etc. It will be easier to find that way. Store stuff that you aren’t sure you are going to keep or things that you can’t categorize easily in a Temp folder first. D:Temp. Then every once and a while file the things that you want to keep and clean out the things you don’t. Don’t download crap that you don’t absolutely need, especially software, tool bars, etc.Buy an external USB Harddrive to use as an archive. Make the directory structure exactly the same as your regular structure on your computer. Then use a free program like winMerge to compare and copy things that have changed over to the archive periodically. e.g., 300GIG, plug and play, $95 - http://www.basoncomputer.com/item.aspx?id=HD250GBUSB37 I actually use them as pairs so I can mirror everything (aka poormans raid). Back up your USB drive periodically on DVD. **Use a zip utility **to create quick backups of files and folders that change often and place them in an archive folder D:Projects\Archive. Name the zip files yyyy-mm-dd_ThingsYouAreBackingUp.zip. That way they will sort. Then you can also copy those to the USB drive or back them up separatly if you need. Always run virus software with automatic updates. Always run windows automatic updates.
If you can get in the habit of doing things like this it makes it very easy to buy a new computer, deal with a home network, or generally handle other disasters like hardware failures. If anyone else has some other tips like this please forward them. I’m always looking for new ideas.
As an update, I was finally able to install Norton 2007. I had to download the Norton uninstall tool, get rid of all Norton previous attempts at installing, and then reinstall following a system scan. I had already done that once previously, but decided to give it a second go, and that worked. Ran Norton, it found the virus, said I was good to go, and, as soon as I reconnected to the Internet, the virus started up again. So now I am redoing the full system scan in “safe” mode, and after that I get to edit the Windows registry. If that doesn’t work, out come the system recovery discs. There are more than a few programs that I don’t use anymore, so this will likely be a good thing anyway. I bought an external hard drive this morning to back up all my photos and music files.