I’ve bought a new system* and the old one’s going to my mother in law.
Before I give it to her, I want to restore it to the condition it was in when I bought it. This is cheifly because a few months ago some kind of virus or trojan or something infected my computer. I got rid of most of its traces, but there’s still something left that I can’t get rid of which periodically loads pop-ups in Internet Explorer and slows the system down almost to a standstill. I can work around this by getting red of iexplorer processes in the control panel whenever I log into an account, and by never opening Internet Explorer myself. But this will all be over MIL’s head. (And she uses AOL which I believe uses Internet Explorer in turn.)
There are other reasons for the system restore–getting rid of extra junk that’s not trojans but that also slows down the system and so on.
But I have some questions.
I am currently using a dedicated graphics card. If I do the restore, will it go back to using the integrated graphics?
The computer is several years old, from before SP2 and maybe even from before SP1 for all I know. So using the original restore CD will roll it back to a time at least before SP2. Will I be able to simply download SP2 using the same computer and install it? Or will my computer be infected the second it touches the internet if it doesn’t already have SP2 installed?
If the latter, what should I download and burn onto CDs from microsoft’s website in order to get the computer up to spec before letting it touch the internet?
-FrL-
*Current system:
AMD XP 2000+
768 MB PC2100 RAM
Geforce FX5700LE
New system:
AMD X2 6000+
2GB PC6400 RAM
Geforce 8800GT 512MB
Oh man this is going to be sweet.