<p>The bad news WAS our computer badly invaded by a nasty virus(es) (that’s a entirely different story!!!)</p>
<p>I took it in and our computer guy had to reformat. He was able to save most of our stuff (maybe all, I can’t tell yet!) but basically he had to reinstall Windows and then just was able to create a folder on our desktop that he dumped anything he could save. Yikes. It will be an adventure figuring out what’s actually there!</p>
<p>I have now reinstalled Microsoft Word myself. How do I get the files in the desktop folder saved back into Microsoft Word? Do I need to do them one at a time? </p>
<p>Also, we had two Itunes users on the computer. The music seems to be there, but we have no Itunes. Obviously I have to reinstall Itunes. When I reinstall and “sign-in” will our music still be there? (this is really confusing isn’t it?) Trouble is, I’m so afraid to try something and screw something up!!!</p>
<p>We have really really learned a lesson about backing up info. (I’ll be asking that question later - how you all back up info). Scary, scary stuff.</p>
<p>Any help appreciated. I just prefer to get a little info/research from others before I go randomly clicking around… :)</p>
<p>H got that virus. Spent all of Christmas vacation trying to save it; finally reformatted and went to Linux. He lost most of what he had, except what was on his flash drive.</p>
<p>It was NASTY!!! I hate that we have no idea where we got it. First time in all our computer life that we have had anything like that happen where we’ve had to take it in to get “fixed”. Very, very scary.</p>
<p>And it did sound like whatever we had, the computer guy has been seeing alot of. :(</p>
<p>D’s boyfriend, a techie by trade just cleared out the remnants of a couple of viruses (Backdoor.Tidserv and Packed.Generic.200). They got past the Windows firewall, but Norton Internet Security found them and eliminated the threat, but had left some residual commands that made computer unusable. He isolated the components and deleted the offending code.</p>
<p>His recommendation was to dump Internet Explorer and go to Mozilla Firefox as a browser. I did that, and everything seems ok now. </p>
<p>Good luck.</p>
<p>We had never been hit before and right after Christmas, the best computer in the house - the one my son uses for homework - got hit by the tdss trojan. Took three days to get rid of it. Awful.</p>
<p>The quantity and potency of malware on Windows is growing and there’s stuff that’s just starting to get by general best practices. Firefox is an improvement but keeping everything updated (Antivirus, Multiple Spyware detectors and cleaners, Windows Defender, Windows Updates, etc.) is getting to be a chore. I have four personal systems with 9 operating systems (8 Windows, 1 Mac OSX) and keeping them clean is starting to become a chore. I do remind the kids to keep their systems updated and to run scans on them from time to time when they are using Windows.</p>
<p>I spend most of my work time on Mac OSX. It’s nice as I’m on a huge corporate network and don’t have to deal with the Windows stuff floating around the network. I know others that have just tossed Windows to go with Mac for the whole household just because a dad was tired of cleaning up all of the computers every other weekend.</p>
<p>I would be just as happy to use Linux if they were up to the level of Mac OSX in terms of usability, manageability and applications availability.</p>
<p>On iTunes, just go to Apple.com and download it and install it. If your music is in mp3 form, just select all of the files and drag it to iTunes. You may be able to do this with native iTunes files too.</p>
<p>For your Word files, create a folder and search for .doc files (or .docx) and drag them to the folder and then sort them out.</p>
<p>We’ve gone to more of a server approach where we save files and information on web pages or documents that are stored on servers on the web. We pay for web hosting and storage in addition to using other services. We can retrieve documents from the web when we need them and use them from any computer that we happen to be using at the time. For videos and pictures, I have a 1 TB MyBook drive that’s on my home network so that others can grab videos or pictures using FTP. Others can store stuff on the MyBook too.</p>
<p>I don’t have a backup drive for the MyBook but I keep copies of our pictures on multiple machines. I should probably look for a backup for the MyBook and keep it in the office or at another residence.</p>