I had plans for this weekend. I really did. They revolved around watching Sci-Fi shows I’d DVR’ed and reading comic books.

There were a few productive things I meant to squeeze in there, but I was ready to do a whole lot of not very much.

Of course, I should have known that couldn’t happen. I’m not very good at doing nothing. Saturday morning I reached the final straw with my PC. One too many little quirky things had happened. I had no doubt what the was wrong.

The computer is almost four years old. The hardware is still very usable, I over-spec’ed it when I bought it for just that reason. But in the course of four years who know what the hell I’ve installed and uninstalled on this thing. I’m a geek, a tinkerer and a bit of a hacker. If there is something new and nifty I’ve probably checked it out. Installed it, tried a few things got bored and forgot about it. The cumulative effect from that alone would cause issues sooner or later.

But let’s be honest. Not everything I do on this computer is exactly on the up and up. Nothing terrible, but I sometimes have occasion to go to undesirable sites and sometimes even brave a download or two. And sometimes I get more than I bargain for.

Whatever the root cause was, I was done with it. I took an inventory of what was installed that I actually use. (Which was a pretty short list compared to what was installed.) I moved the data that was on the C: drive to the external drive. And then I formatted the damn thing.

I seriously considered loading Ubuntu. There are some real advantages to that, but in the end laziness won out. I know what I need in XP and how to set it up pretty quickly. I didn’t want to spend the time or energy configuring Linux to see my mixer and get shoutcast working; or make it see the RAW files from my camera so that I can manage my photo.

I installed XP, the drivers, SP2 and pulled down a shitload of patches. I joined the PC to my home domain and then started installing software.

That’s when things got ugly. I was trying to install a piece of software that I had… ahem… lost the key to. I proceeded to visit some shady sites that might be able to give a key I could use… since mine was… err… lost. I wasn’t having any luck, so I downloaded a key cracker. I know that this is risky business. It wasn’t a cracker but a trojan horse. Fuckers.

To make matters worse my Antivirus engine (but not the definitions) is a couple of years old. It was one that I had a license from my last job. It wasn’t picking this thing up. I went to antivirus.com and used Trend Micro’s House Call to do an online scan. It was seeing the buggers.

I wasted no time downloading Trend Micro’s Antivirus software and installing it. It was able to get a bunch of the bastards, but some of them couldn’t be deleted. I booted into recovery console and got rid of them, but when I rebooted there were new ones. It went back and forth like this until I was able to find where it had changed the registry and hack it out.

At least I think I have.

And I haven’t so much as read a comic book this weekend.