Attacked by a Virus (& I don't know how to find out which one)

[plkime]

1st...a little background...I am coming to you guys because I have been "lurking" around trying to improve (actually gain) my knowledge on how to make dvd's of my kid's football and lacrosse games from my video camera to my new (virgin) computer, edit them, take out frames, connect 2 tapes to 1 movie, etc., I have been very impressed with the knowledge and resources that come from here and I was hoping that maybe someone might have a little advice or at least a direction to, with some help on how to search for my following predicament. I will try to keep to the point but will probably give unnecessary background info (and I am sorry in advance) - and please excuse my sarcasm’s - but am a bit unhappy at the moment....!!!

Here it goes:

My most precious 8) "teenage male hormone" (who is now 18 and knows all ....) used my old (which is normally connected to the internet) Dell Dimension XPS 733br with Windows 98 SE, IE 6, Comcast (always on) Cable internet connection (which is now offline sitting next to me, sick ......) and my (now no-longer) "internet-virgin" pc is currently connected so that hopefully I can find a solution... went to "MYSPACE" and contracted a disease on my poor old computer...which does (did) have McAfee (kept it updated at all times - version ?) virus and firewall running at all times... my problem is... We had a couple power outages yesterday, the first one was early in the am (before we got up), and the second one occurred during the waking hours, so I figured better to be safe than sorry, went around and unplugged all of my electronical equipment, computers, tv's, printers, x-boxes, cable boxes/modems, etc.... and not really trusting the power company to get it right after a couple hours, I left everything off until my "teenage male hormone" asked if the computer was back on...and if he could get online..., I ever so diligently said no, I have to plug everything back in, than sure, go for it... and to my surprise, after plugging everything back in, my old faithful powered on (taking longer than usual....ok, it had been shut off unexpectedly a couple times and left off all day, needed some extra time....it's old, I understand old...), I have it set so that it does not automatically go to windows, it goes to the startup menu first (I know - Control Freak), and it highlighted #5 Go to Dos Prompt, instead of the normal #1 Go to Windows, which I thought was strange, but ok, somehow it may of got surged....needed some TLC, so I said ok, lets go to Dos and see what's up. The error message "No Himem.sys, can't start windows, run scanreg and restart" came up....ok, could live with that...completed the task restarted, same error came up.... ok, checked my c:\ for the himem.sys, wasn't there, checked my windows, config, system, system32, not anywhere to be found....strange, noticed the dates and names seemed to be different, (probably just my old brain playing tricks on me), started printing out different directories so I could compare things, found in the windows directory at the bottom of the list the following:

PING EXE 24,576 04-23-99 10:22P
FTP EXE 45,056 04-23-99 10:22P
SMARTUN INF 543 04-23-96 4:03P
LOA35
..
e\ 0 15-31-99 19:63a (which the really
weird thing is my birthday is 3-19-1963
and my son's is 2-15-1988......) something seems to be a bit out of the NORM...

so, I disconnected the cat 5 cable at the modem, and have now plugged in this one to find out what to do....my new system does not have a floppy drive, it does have a burner, and my old system has a burner, and I "normally" can change the bios to boot at the cd/dvd drive (but haven't tried it yet - due to fear and frustration) - since my new system is win xp sp2, and I don't know where all of the s/w for the old sys is due to printing boxes of paper for this video/dvd and college stuff I have buried everything.... HELP!!!! Please just give me some direction ! I am really not computer illiterate (normally), I am just out of sorts....!!!!!

THANK YOU in advance for any help!!!!

[BJ_M]

fdisk the drive and re-install windows .....

i always considered win98se to be sort of a temp OS , you just re-install as required , at least once a year

[plkime]

Thank you for replying so quickly!!!!
I thought about that, then remembered, I didn't pull everything off (or backed it up yet....) that I needed.... am I screwed? Isn't there a way to make a boot cd with a virus scanner that won't destroy the data? I'm sorry, I know I am reaching!

[BJ_M]

yep - they got em here http://www.bootdisk.com/

[plkime]

YOU, are AWESOME! Thank you so very much!!!

May I ask 1 more question?

How does anyone get anything else done?

I get lost for days just sitting on the computer reading here going there, link after link, never closing any windows so I can get back to the original place I started....while reading and printing, printing and reading and more reading & printing, and saving...(especially since my old brain can't retain all this info-I have to print), the paper industry must love it....my floorspace is crying!

[BJ_M]

well switch to firefox for one thing and use tabs ..

i rarely print anything out or even have much in the way of links ... maybe only a few 100 ....

i just remember everything else or do a search


it is often better to just try it out on your own and even fail a couple times -- you tend to learn a lot more that way ..