I have two PCs that I built myself. One is about 9 years old that I keep in my den for anyone to use as well as the sole PC for my young children. Even with its age, I was able to install Windows 7 Home on this PC and it had two logins. One was a admin login that was only used by my wife and myself and the other was a standard user that was fully locked down for everyone else. It was limited on web sites, no downloading, no installing, would only run programs I specifically allowed, etc. Pretty tight security.
Well on July 4th my very intelligent 16 year old god-child had a burnt copy of The Crazies and my sister's boyfriend wanted a copy of it. Me not wanting to go upstairs to make a copy in my PC, I allowed my god-child access to the admin login so he could install the appropriate software and make the copy. I knew I should have just got off my ass.
The next day I realized the software he grabbed was laden with a very powerful trojan that after a month of trying everythign I could think of and many different removal tools, it was still there tyring to reinstall itself and other stuff over and over again.
So, I decided, to give up once the PC even started having issues loading; it kept locking up just after login. I figured it would just be simplier to reinstall Win7 fresh and put back all my locks and software etc. After all what's a max of a couple hours right? Well that was two weeks ago.
Immediately I started having driver issues due to the old age of the mobo (Asus A7N8X-X) and gpu (Geforce 6600 GTS). I was able to get everything but the gpu working. Basically, I realized that the virus did not cause my locking up at login, but my gpu was simply dead.
So, last weekend I decided to hit up NewEgg and pick up an old apg 8x gpu and my issues would be solved. (The rest of the PC is fine as I can use it normally with the gpu disabled, just no fancy graphix) So I purchased a Sapphire HD 3650 that was a slight upgrade to what I had for only $60. I get it today and after 4 hours of messing with drivers I realize that my old ass mobo with its nForce2 (yes 2) circuitry just wasn't going to work with this card. FUCK! Also, every other card on newegg was far lower than the 6600 I had or simply too much money for what it is.
So, I then jumped back on NewEgg, setup my RMA (gotta love newegg) and ordered a combo mobo/cpu with onboard geforce 6150 gpu for $70. Fuck it, just gonna replace my mobo/barton 2500 cpu.
While this setup may technically be a little slower than what it was, it will actually be far more modern and will work just fine for the purposes of my open PC (Its actually Win7 cert). However, I will also need to spend $40 on new memory as its not compatible with what was in old PC. But, the case, psu, hdd, DVD, etc are all gonna work. So for about $100 total I'll have a practically new PC for my kids.
I just wanted to share my experience with you all. Keep in mind this really should have only taken me a couple weeks vs over two months, but with work/school/family I couldn't fiddle with it every day/night.
