Essential maintainence of your Windows computer

Over the winter break, my brother brought up his wife's Win XP box which had been rendered unbootable due to a virus downloaded by their son. I pulled out the hard drive or HD and connected it as an external drive to a working XP box. I then spent many hours

1. removing the viruses. I used MS Security Essentials and then some newly downloaded AV software from malwarebytes.com
   


2. trying to get the cleaned HD to boot to no avail. Even booting via "Safe Mode with Command Prompt" which is least demanding boot process would hang in the middle.
   


3. copying the personal data in C:\Documents And Settings to a safe place. On this 2005 Acer, this consisted of copying from the main XP partition (80G) to the second "data" partition on the HD (also 80G), as Acer had conveniently split the HD into two partitions, the second being just for data. But I worried that the blind re-install might overwrite both partitions, so I also copied the personal data to another HD. And finally my brother copied select folders to another computer.


4. finally, running the Acer recovery CD 1. It turns out the recovery was a Norton Ghost image that was 2.0 GB which spanned 3 CDs. Now that the data was safe, the restore took very little time.

About 6 months ago, my own laptop got infected. I was able to remove the virus but the computer was no longer stable.

The moral: Recovering personal data and trying to remove the malware is very time consuming and stressful, as you don't want to trash anything accidently and there is sigficant uncertainty in what happened and what to do. You can easily waste 8-16 hours here. After you finally realize a clean install is necessary, reinstalling the OS is really pretty fast (less than an hour) and stress free.

Here are the essential actions you must do if you own a computer and don't want to lose your data or spend significant time/money/anguish trying to recover precious things. These are all obvious. And fortunately easier than ever before.

1. (a) Make periodic backups, say every 1-6 months. If you skip this step, eventual disaster is almost certain due to hardware failures, a virus infection, or user error. If you do this step and nothing else, the damage is contained. External USB hard drives are $100 or less for 1 TB (!) of storage at all major retailers (Target, Costco, Longs, CVS, Walmart, etc).
   (b) pick a backup program of your choice and use it. Even just dumb copying "Documents and Settings" to a new folder with the date, say "docs-2010-01-05", gets you most of the protection you need.
2. Install anti-malware (virus, rootkit, spyware) protection. Use your favorite program if you have one.
   Genuine: If you don't have a preference or don't have any protection, download the excellent free Microsoft Security Essentials which is free, lightweight and fast, comprehensive in that it protects against all sorts of malware, easy to use with a clean UI, and perpetual in that does not have a time limit. Did I mention it was free too? Reviews of it are very good with it catching most malware and it seems to be getting better. The one catch, you must be running a licensed or "genuine" copy of Windows XP, Vista or 7.
   Not necessarily genuine: If you are not running a genuine copy of Windwos, I suggest the AV and anti-spyware that comes with the free Google Pack and choose the anti-malware. (About 4 years ago a nice, super basic Norton Security Scan was included but about 2 years ago Symantec changed it to an annoying crippled Security Scan). As of today the PC Tools AV and anti-spyware package is included, which I have not tested.
3. Enable automatic updates for Windows. Microsoft releases patches regularly, some of which protect against real threats.
   
4. Use Firefox as your browser, and accept the updates. As of Jan 2010, FF is the best browser out there for security and overall usability. It keeps track of known bad web sites and will often warn you if a web site is trying to install something funny.
   What about the other browsers?
   (i) Chrome is very nice, with the ability to kill specific web pages that are causing problems, but it needs support for plugins before I can offer my highest recommendation.
   (ii) IE 8 is the best browser Microsoft has ever produced but IE 7 is only good and IE 6 is just plain scary. IE is not updated very often either, so it's simplest to stay away.

And that's it. These are the essential actions, so I've kept it short.