Virus problem?

When everything is re-installed is there any way I can make a mirror of his hard drive so if it happens again I can just copy everything back as it was?

You could using some ghost-ing software to make an image of the hard drive, also I think win7 has some kind of back up facility that would do it but I've not used it myself

If he can cope with it, I suggest you download a free version of Sandboxie. His Internet may run slightly slower, but it means that anything nasty picked up from a website is discarded when you leave the Net. I've been using it for a couple of years without problems. To check it out, go to
http://www.sandboxie.com/
Good luck. Eric

I've only just seen this thread, but my advice would be that if it's really that bad, you need to nuke it from orbit - complete reformat and reinstall. Copy any life-or-death necessary data files onto a usb stick and run a reliable virus check on them before putting them back on his PC.

How can anyone get that virused-up? Has he been clicking on links in spam mail or ad popups (or you are the 1 millionth visitor to this site, click here to win a virus) or something? I'd suggest a battery of antivirus software, and that you go round there every so often to check it. And have a cuppa and a chat with your dad at the same time of course!

I hope your right.. Imagine the joy at believing all those adverts were real!

Fapping over Paris Hilton, obvs.

Being reformatted and reinstalled as I speak. It's going to cost him £70 so hopefully he'll learn from it but I won't hold my breath.

Data backed up to put back on when I get PC back.

No idea.

Probably.
He's been on 2 silver surfer courses and claims he knows what he's doing. He won't listen to what me or my sister says then wonders why he has problems.

He's 76 so well past that and would probably think Paris Hilton was a hotel in France.

jeez, i should go into business myself , next time, let me know and il do it for 50

I could do it myself but the computer came with vista pre-installed with no OEM disk so I can't blow it out as I'll have nothing to put back on it.

I should have made a recovery disk but I've never had to blow a computer out before other than to downgrade one so didn't think I'd need to.

A recovery disk will be made this time.

It's too late now, but really the very best thing to do in this sort of case is put in a replacement HDD and put the old one in an external caddy so that nothing can get accidentally lost. Then you take away the virus-ridden HDD and put it in a safe place. Just in case.

When he gets his PC back, set him up with an account that has USER level privileges, maybe Power User, not Admin. And make sure he cannot turn off UAC.

To reinstall all those useful little utilities in one easy go, I recommend you go to ninite.com.

I was going to do that.

What? How?

Cheers. Looks really useful. Not that dad has that many utilities to reinstal anyway.

Software re-installed and computer locked down. He doesn't know the admin password.

When did ISP's start saving your e-mails to your hard drive automatically as he appears to have lost loads of them?

Where would they be saved to? I've looked in all the places I can think of and no signs of e-mails.

How do I create a recovery disk? Vista is less than helpful by saying the vista disk is bootable and to use that but if your computer came preinstalled to check the manual. Well it was preinstalled with the recoverd disk as a partition on the C: drive so when it got formatted it got wiped as well.