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General PC Setup & Operation
First just let me say that some problems
have no explanation.
A client asks about a PC that
would not boot up: A diagnostic program verified that there were
no hardware faults. Three different virus scanners, run from
a clean boot diskette and CD and updated, found no viruses. The
boot files were gone, so I restored them from a backup, but still
no boot, so I SYSed the drive and still no heartbeat. I then
performed a FDISK /MBR command and It then booted, but had no
Windows. I checked the Windows directory, and win.ini, sys.ini
and the Command directory, win.com, and several DLLs were missing,
along with Windows\options\cabs and the wininit.ini file under
c:\windows. I reinstalled Windows, but none of the applications
work. Do you know of a virus that will do that, or could it have
been the client?"
 I
get questions like this all the time, and since I'm not on the
scene, I can only offer an educated guess. In this case, a client-user
could cause such random-appearing damage, and there are thousands
of destructive programs--some can delete or overwrite files in
the root directory, others work on c:\windows, some attack the
first megabyte, and so on. But picking and choosing files as
described would be unusual for a user or a virus. Most viruses
are designed to spread themselves around before wrecking the
place, but some are not, and most Trojans don't wait. Some get
destroyed along with file data, leaving no evidence. And there's
the possibility that something is there that scanners can't detect
because they don't recognize the what the user did. In cases
like this, it would be advisable to check with the vendor if
this happens again.
All this being said. The worst
thing you can do to a computer is load software. Yep. You read
that right. Loading software. There are so many developers out
there making software that it just stokes the mind. Not all these
guys follow the rules when writing the code and guess who gets
it in the rear. YOU. There are ways of protecting yourself, you
can backup using popular software, but an extra hard drive hoping
that lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place and you
could hire a consultant to give you redundant backup of your
most precious blood sweat and tears... your data.
Setting Up Your System
When you buy a new computer or
have one built for you, the common concenus these days between
technologists is to have a hard drive backup in addition to some
other form like a Zip drive or a CDR/CDRW drive. The point here
is nothing wrong with redundancy. In fact, more times than not,
I've had to depend on the secondary backup to restore data. Your
biggest worry is a virus coming in through your email. There
are very rare situations where you can get one from a store bought
CD like Microsoft Office or the like but this is rare.
So that being said, get a good
backup device.
Now then...
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