Sometimes you don't know who to trust! This is to all of you build it yourself people out there. This weekend I got ready for sp2, in the process I found a trojan virus on my motherboard's drivers CD. I was not really happy with the way my IE6 was preforming, Even though I had not been able to find anything wrong, it just wasn't right. So I reformated the hard disk. When you boot off the windows XP disk it gives you two options, install XP and repair XP. If you select repair xp it installs the repair consol. First I wanted to make sure the boot files were good ones and not viruses! I ran fixmbr and fixboot. I then ran diskpart to delete all partions, and to recreate them. I then cold booted the machine! That means pulling the power plug in some cases. I restored power, and booted off the cd again, this time I installed XP. Note I had the dsl modem turned off until I could make sure I had the xp firewall turned on. After XP I installed the latest version of Avast my favorite anti virus program. Normally I install all my drivers after XP, but not this time. Anyway I installed my sound card drivers and realized I had not installed my, on the motherboard vidio graphics card drivers, for some reasion XP nevers installs the right ones. So I put the drivers disk in, it autoran the install program, I selected autoinstall, and that was when Avast pulled the alarm! Turned out that one of the commands (reboot.exe) had a virus in it. Avast calls it a win32:Trojan-gen {DELPHI} virus, McAfee calls it a backdoor-rs virus. So far the last year I have had this virus on my machine. The thing about antivirus programs is most of them asuume that your machine is clean when you install them. When we had dos and the fat and fat32 format we could boot of a floppy and run a dos antivirus to make sure the hard drive was clean before installing the win version of the antivirus. I guess we need to look into that.
While you are thinking on this, put your motherboard Drivers cd in the cd and check it with your antivirus program!
Come see me at Systematic Investing group #board-966 lets talk formula plans.
