To start this off, let me say that my computer has a virus. Exactly WHICH virus, I don't know. I have managed to isolate where the virus is, and I know what its been doing, and while I've killed the virus' effects, I cannot destroy the virus itself. For the past several weeks, I've noticed an anomalous increase in the number of low-disk-space warnings for my C: drive. Now, I have two hard drives, 160GB and a 500GB, PATA and SATA respectively, both WDC. The 160 is split into 3 partitions: C (system), D (storage), and E (secondary boot which runs Windows98SE for EXTREME legacy, though it doesn't work right now). I've been installing as much as I can on the D drive, and the H drive (500) to avoid straining the C, and I even changed the swap file location so it wouldn't use C. Even as I added virtually NOTHING to the drive, it was getting filled. I recall clearing up 1.4GB of space one morning, and by the end of the day I was back to 190MB free. It was that point that I couldn't deny that a virus was responsable, and I began searching for solutions.
My Norton AV had suffered some kind of "error" which disabled the active scan, though I did manage to repair that at one point. Unfortunately, once that was done, not Norton, nor another Symantec special detector program (that I downloaded for their website), nor a free trial version of AVG 2011 that I'm running in the interim will detect this virus, even if I point it directly at the directory that I know that the virus occupies. Anyway, I fought with it tooth & nail, uninstalling programs and deleting files, trying to stay ahead of it. At one point, I even cleared up 500MB, only to have it disappear in two minutes. Eventually, after some hunting through directories, I tracked down where all my space had gone to... in fact it and the virus were hiding within Norton ITSELF, disguised as a virus definitions auto-down-loader. In retrospect, I should have realized it, since Norton was always complaining that I didn't set my preferences to auto-download-and-auto-install. After I tracked it down, I decided that Norton wasn't doing much anyway, so I uninstalled both Norton Anti-Virus and Norton System-Works, the latter of which extracted all the bogus super-inflated files, clearing up 9GB of space! Then I went back to the program that I suspected was the virus itself, and tried to uninstall that. I was met with a message telling me that it was a Symantec component that could not be uninstalled because my other Symantec programs NEEDED it..., eh, WHAT other symantec products. I tracked down the files themselves and tried to delete them, but again I was told that I couldn't do that... funny, in retrospect it reminds me of HAL. So anyway, I deleted every file from that directory that I could, but three remain. At the very least, I've identified WHERE they are and what they disguise themselves as, and where they may try to leave their trash. It gives me some much-needed breathing room, but I already had plans to go further... and so ends the backstory.
Even before I found and crippled the virus, I had already come to the decision that a complete format of the 160GB drive was in order. Now, my copy of Norton was from 2008, my MS Office was from 2004, and both it and my WinXP were,... ahem, less than legally obtained. Because of this, I expected that I would not be able to reinstall them after my format, which left purchasing a legal copy of the software, and there seemed little logic in purchasing a brand new copy of a 2-generation old OS, so I will go for Windows 7, and a new copy of MS Office (home and student). However, I was concerned that my current hardware might be insufficient to run this new OS, so a hardware upgrade became in order. My last hardware upgrade was back in 2004, so it was overdue (though if this virus hadn't reared its head, I could have easily continued to use my current system for at least another year). I purchased the bulk of my software last night, and at a substantial discount thanks to a Future Shop flyer and Wal-Mart's competition policies, plus my employee's discount. I purchased Windows Home Premium, MS Office Home and Student, and Norton 360 V.4. Thanks to competition, I saved at least $90 between the copy of Office and 360. Then today, I returned the Windows copy at my own store and sunk my savings into it, swapping up to Windows 7 Professional edition, mainly due to the Windows XP compatibility mode.
Tomorrow I will be making a trip out to a local PC retailer and pick up a motherboard, CPU, RAM, Video Card and a new power supply, which should come to about $650. I was hoping for ASUS motherboard and video card, but they seem to be hard to come by, so I had to settle for a Gigabyte motherboard, with (what I have been assured are) equivalent specs, and a PowerColour video card (same idea). The MB is equivalent to an ASUS in the M4A87 class, and the video card mounts an ATI 6850, 1GB DDR5. I'm going for only 4GB of DDR3-1600 system ram, though the board can handle up to 16GB. I usually go for a 4X increase in RAM between upgrades, for both system and Video (1GB DDR system and 128MB SDR Video for my current), so that should be respectable and give me some upgrade headroom. The CPU will be a Phenom II X2 3.4 GHz. The salesman on the other end of the line suggested, at my questioning, that although my existing case should do fine, I might want to upgrade the power supply, since my VC sucks up quite a bit of juice.
Firstly, is the Windows XP compatibility mode required to run FSO? Will I run into trouble running a 32-bit app in WinXP compatibility on a 64-bit OS install? What kind of graphical pitfalls can I expect, and what kind of hidden enhancements should I look to enable in FSO?
I look forward to your comments on this, though at some point tomorrow night I'll shutting down to replace and reconfigure.
Wish me luck!
