John David Bradshaw’s latest ‘Team JDB Tips & Updates’ post is titled “Save your sanity before it’s too late”. [Blog]


John David Bradshaw’s latest ‘Team JDB Tips & Updates’ post:

Save your sanity before it’s too late

Yes, after 4 weeks of struggling with my laptop recovering from the worst viral and adware/spyware attack I have ever been a victim of, I can finally say with a guarded level of confidence…

“I’m b-a-c-k!”

To make a long story short, I did not have a recovery dvd for my laptop. I had purchased the machine as a demo for about 50% of retail. And it didn’t come with all of the original stuff. (I’m assuming the manufacturer would have included a recovery disk with the original package.)

To make matters worse, the motherboard was replaced under warranty during the first year I had the laptop.

I ordered a recovery disc from the manufacturer(cost $39.95) based on the original serial number on the bottom of the laptop.

When I received the disc, it didn’t work. I don’t know if it had anything to do with the new motherboard, or not, but bottom line after waiting 2 weeks for the recovery disc, I still had no working laptop.

Matter of fact, I was worse off, because the recovery disc reformatted the hard drive and then didn’t put anything back on it; or if it did, it still didn’t work.

So I had to get my own copy of Windows XP, and load it on the hard drive. Then I had to locate and install all of the drivers and applications to make the laptop work again.

Now I am in the process of re-installing things like Camtasia 3, Snag-It, PageMaker, MS Office 2003, and several more.

The first thing I installed after getting the basic machine working again was Norton 360. It is a do-everything suite of protection from Symantec.Includes anti-virus, firewall, adware/spyware protection, identity-theft safeguards, and more.

I’ll let you know how it works out after I have used it for awhile.

I’ve learned a lot about my laptop after enduring all of the “pain” of this nightmare. But it could have been a lot worse. Fortunately I did have most of my files backed up on an external hard drive.

And the laptop seems to be booting up a lot faster now that I have cleaned a bunch of junk from the hard drive.

In researching some of this, I came across a guy named Kris Mainieri. He claims to be an ex-hacker who is now determined to help the rest of us with the fine-tuning and protecting of our machines. (Hackers are not all bad 😉

He has a report which I bought called PC Secret Formula.

It is full of how-to info with links where to get free software to tweak your pc to make it run faster and safer.

I noticed he covered some of the exact things I needed to do to get my laptop back to normal. I would recommend you check out his report. You can find it here:

http://www.i-65.com/go/pcsf/imnwja20

You can pick it up for the price of a small pizza…

Now to get back on track from where I was before Christmas.

I had a new product almost ready to release when this fiasco hit…I’ll pick up the pieces and get it out to you as soon as I can.

In the meantime, do yourself a favor. Make sure you know where your recovery discs are. And if you don’t have any, check to see if your system has a way to create a recovery dvd. And by all means, backup your critical files. It will save you a ton of grief should anything horrific happen to your computer.

Glad to be back,

John (David*) Bradshaw

*not the “love” doctor

Save your sanity before it’s too late

Team JDB Tips & Updates Blog

 

*This blog post was submitted by John David Bradshaw.

*IMNewswatch would like to thank John David Bradshaw for for granting permission to reprint the latest blog post.

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