> ...Well, last week: AMD 1700 (some 4yrs old), 256MB RAM, 
> Windows 2000.
> Some 30minutes formatting (this was speeded up in XP); 
> some 30 minutes
> installing; go downloading Updates (80MB IIRC) but just 2 
> reboots;
> install drivers from CD (some 5 minutes, and just one 
> update - I NEVER
> trust the "reboot now" thing and usually the PC is kind 
> with me :-)
> One more maybe for antivirus.
> 6-7 reboot in total. some 2 full hours working hard :)

While away in China for 2 weeks recently I reinstalled XP 
home about (lost count for certain) 6 times over a number of 
days in order to try to eliminate an especially pernicious 
and crippling trojan from the system. I contracted the 
trojan from a Chinese site while trying to locate drivers 
for my client's PC. His had been (apparently) trashed by 
logging into a wireless network in Seoul airport - a known 
bug causes some files to be replaced so that subsequently 
... .  He and the hotel IT man then managed to totally trash 
the system to the wouldn't-boot stage. So, I got his going 
but killed mine.

Trojan was logogogo.exe. Hard to find details and it seemed 
to hide well outside the windows area proper and even 
several complete new windows installs in new directories 
failed to kill it. Ran OK for a while and then popped up 
again. Tended to kill net access making redress hard. Also 
attempted net access of its own after various periods of 
time. Reformatting was not an option. Taught me things about 
security level needed for foreign country hotel internet 
operation.

6 installs takes a lot of user interventions alas. My body 
also contracted a virus of its own so I was not feeling too 
good at nights. So I put laptop on the bed by me and slept 
on top of bed. Occasionally I'd wake up and check laptop for 
next "user intervention" then go back to sleep. Not the 
ideal way to sleep or to install Win-doze [tm] but it 
finally worked OK :-). (Fortunately long experience/abuse of 
my sleeping systems means that I now drop into REM sleep 
almost instantly so a summation of small sleeps is almost as 
effective as a long sleep, but not as satisfying).

At one stage I tried to buy a floppy diskette to allow me to 
do a clean boot (make disk on clients PC was the theory) to 
allow me to remove a file which was otherwise always locked 
by the system. NOBODY knew what a floppy disk was despite 
many pictures and much pantomime. Even if they had been able 
to speak more than zero English I don't think it would have 
helped. One lady did very well in offering me a device which 
indeed looked VERY like a floppy diskette in shape and size 
but which was a 100 MB "optical RAM" cartridge. The HP 
laptop I had with me (bought in desperation in Vienna 4 
years ago) has a floppy drive AND a serial port AND a 
parallel port. These were somewhat unusual even then and 
about all modern laptops have none of these.


            Russell

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