As of late, computers have been the devil for my husband and myself. You should really read the blog entry I made back in October about Windows Updates attacking my computer and me about to melt down.

This time, though, my husband’s computer was the one with the trouble. Somehow he had gotten a virus called Paladin Anti-Virus which tries to look like an anti-virus program and tries to delete things from the computer and even turns it into an email bot. He was able to get rid of it, he thinks, but we haven’t checked in a few days because we don’t want it to reproduce itself, plus when it’s connected to the internet, it takes up a lot of bandwidth and slows down my computer on the network. I showed him how to disable the wireless card in the computer and when he did that, the internet sped up quite a bit for me. I need to reformat it before we’re comfortable turning it back on.

Well, just as this was happening, my computer started to give me a BSOD (blue screen of death) and it got to the point to where it would boot up, I could start FireFox but then it would BSOD and then restart. It was really getting on my nerves. So, I decided to install Windows again on the hard drive while keeping the original installation of Windows. After installing all the drivers for my video cards, wireless, bluetooth, etc. on the new install of Windows, I discovered I was having a very hard time connecting to the internet. It was driving me insane. I logged into our router/modem and changed the network key, thinking I had been typing it in incorrectly, I tried to configure some of the settings of the router that I thought might have been keeping me from connecting, but this didn’t help. I did diagnostics, uninstalled my wireless drivers and everything, thinking it was the wireless in my computer not working. It wasn’t until I tried to connect my iTouch to the network that I discovered that it wasn’t just my computer but my iTouch also couldn’t connect. Everything said we were connected, but we weren’t able to get an IP to actually load any websites.

I gave up for the night.

Then, the next day after work, I came home and called our internet provider’s support and was informed that our internet had been interrupted by them to block our ability to connect to the internet because there was a computer in my house that was using an insane amount of bandwidth and was turned into an email bot. I knew exactly who’s computer it was, my husbands. The lady on the phone said she would re-enable our internet and to have him reformat and not get anymore viruses (duh).

I was finally able to connect! After going insane trying to figure the issue out myself and not being able to find anything wrong other than not getting an IP, I was finally ready to fix my own computer trouble.

I thought I could still try to fix the issue with the original Windows install but couldn’t and I didn’t want to take up so much drive space with all the files and components of the first Windows. I had done this before and just removed the original Windows install and edited the boot.ini file, but I was sick of dealing with Windows issues on my computer, so since I had to start almost completely fresh, I decided to back my important files up on my external hard drive and then just reformat the entire thing, so I did. I was excited to do so because I just wanted a fresh start.

I’m currently in the process of re-adding all my programs and getting everything back to “normal”.

Now, my computer is back up, running very smoothly, faster and able to connect to the internet. It’s a good feeling. I’ve never had a virus on this computer (knock on wood), but I do seem to be having a slew of Windows issues with it, which has made me decide to buy a Mac the next time I buy a computer.

What kind of Windows issues have you had? I’m really curious to hear other Windows horror stories from others.

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