Colin Wilson wrote:
Interested to know what people think about recovery disks. I recently
sorted out a friend's Dixons PC, which was infected with all manner of
nasties. Put My Documents on to a cdrw, booted from the Dixons recovery
CD and the whole thing was running sweetly within the hour. Doing that
periodically seems like a simple maintenance schedule for any level of
user.
So, how easy would it be to create a bootable CD for a home made
machine? I rather fancy a bit of colonic irrigation


While I don`t have a bootable recovery disc for mine, I do keep my
emergency CD updated regularly with pretty much everything I list on my
site for keeping spyware and other assorted malware at bay.

One thing you end up doing by "flattening" a system to a bare install
again is to leave yourself open to the myriad of hacks patched since the
recovery CD was created.

In your friends case, did you simply reinstall and leave him to it, or
did you "harden" it a little to give him slightly more than a cat in
hells' chance of getting the patches before he got re-hacked ?

Did him Zone Alarm, Spybot, Adaware, Thunderbird, Firefox and SP2, all
of which he has to reinstall each time but it's straightforward stuff,
even for a beginner.
He had a particularly nasty rogue dialer that ended up costing BT a few quid