What to do?

[dgcartel]

OK that's it. I was going to give WinXP a chance I really was, but I have now caught 4 viruses in 2 days. All Backdoor Trojan Viruses, 3 on my laptop and one on my desktop. How did I get them you ask, "Who knows" These were fresh installs and all that was loaded was the usual thing i use to work with and play.
Microsoft Office XP
IE 6
Photoshop 6
Morpheus (napster-like)*dont worry i didnt download from it)
Wolfenstein

I had normal everyday things installed. So how i got these viruses is anyones guess. I wanted winhoze to play my games on but Im not to sure now. I think someone got access to my network at home and put these trojans in. If they did, if it is that easy to do I want no part of windows anymore :mad: So im here to ask for suggestions. These are my specs what do u all recommend i should load.

Desktop:
Dell Dimension 8100
1.8ghz
768mb ram
120gb HD Space :eek: (80 in machine & 40 external usb 2.0)
GeForce 3

Laptop:
IBM Thinkpad T21
800mhz
256mb ram
20gb HD
Savage IX 8mb Video

:confused: :confused:

[The Whizzard]

some virii like the old nyb(common with win95) hide in the MBR. sometimes it can be transfered to floppy(infected floppys must be thrown out), which will spread to other machines if booted from. even if, acidently, you leave in a infected non-bootable floppy, it'll still transfer itself to the harddisk MBR. there are utilities to remove these virii but the easiest it to use a brand new floppy with a win9x emergency boot and run 'fdisk /mbr'. it'll be a good idea to make such disk on a computer known not to be infected. hopefully, the backup MBR isn't corrupt.

[m3rlin]

yes you may be right wizzard, or some one took advantage of the security failure in WinXP, this failure allowed anyone on the network to connect to your Pc with a simple program, and make everthing that he wannts, he could installed the backdoor just for when the person downloaded the patch for than insecurity on winXP he could still have access to his computer.

My opinion for make it secure is to uninstall windowsXP, but that could not be an option, so install a firewall, close all the ports that you don't use, and download the patch in windows web site.
That should make it more safe!!! O yes try to remove those trojens or erase the disk and install all over again.
Good luck!!!