when we sold to our friend nopalita twiddle thumbs's pc to help support our trip to new zealand, i loaded it with virus/trojan/worm/spyware zapping software and the girl never used it. some family members moved in and used the computer and now it's fucked. it's in worse shape than twiddle thumbs's little sister's laptop. i know because i spent at least 48 hours trying to fix the damn thing and 8 hours working on nopalita's computer.

about 1 in every 5 restarts, it will boot up enough to actually let you click around and take a look at what's going on. for a little while that is. so many damn processes running. so many things wrong. so many obvious infections. i deleted what i could manually and that helped quite a bit. i was amazed when i had been able to get it stable enough to reinstall her dsl software and log on to the internet and download a free virus checker and updates to spyware programs. we ran the virus checker and went to dinner. when we got back it had found 500 infections. then we ran the spyware program, which found 250 infections. but doing all that only seemed to put the computer in a worse state. we couldn't even get it to do a full boot again so i forced it off and gave up to tackle it another day. we'll probably save ourselves a lot of headaches if we can just get in long enough to save her important files and reinstall the os, wiping out the system.