Re-Imaging the Kitchen PC in Palos Verdes

So, in combating the Great Virus and Trojan Horse infection of 2008, this evening after dinner at his mom's Bert and I drove up to Palos Verdes early to get a head start on re-imaging his PC.

After arriving at his house and getting down to business, I did some preliminary research to get the hardware specs and drivers and manuals information for that PC.  For the record, I found the following:

• Purchase Date: 12/16/2005
• Model Name: Dell XPS 400
• Hard Drive Space: 500 GB in (2) 250 GB hard disks
• 4 GB of RAM

After looking at the PDF docs for that system available from the Dell support site just for entering a system tag, I determined that the magic keystroke combination to invoke the factory "system restore" image was "Ctrl-F11" at the Dell BIOS screen during the boot-up sequence.

invoking that command brought us to the Symantec 'System Restore' program and that trundled for a while, finally failing with a cryptic error message about a problem reading a file from drive 'X'.

Rebooting the machine we then struggled to get Norton Ghost 10 installed,  Eventually, we did manage to get it installed and were then able to restore the computer to an image that was created on 12/25/05, about 9 days after the PC was originally purchased.

The Restore took some time but once it was complete all that was left was to install Windows Live OneCare and uninstall a whole bunch of the crapware that Dell includes with the computer.  After All of that and then installing Windows XP Service Pack 3 and the interminable number of reboots that are associated with that, the PC seemed perfectly fine and ready to go.

We installed the latest versions of iTunes, AOL, Firefox and the Google Browser sync add-on and made sure all systems were go including drive sharing and connecting to the printer downstairs in the den.

All that is left now is for Bert to restore the individual ITunes libraries for his children and make sure his wife has access to everything she needs.

We will see how long this latest re-image lasts.  For Bert's sanity, I really hope it lasts lonmger than just a few months.  Sheesh.