Oline AV

Her pics are almost certainly OK.

You can take the disk out and hook it up on the second controller cable in a good machine (w2k or later) and copy the pic files off, then burn them to a CD (make a couple copies and do a readback/verify) she won't lose her picture.

If the owner of the good machine is nervious, he's not foolish. Make sure his AV software is running and up to date before you hook up the disk but you should be OK as long as you don't click on anything you haven't virus scanned.

Once you've done that you can, on the same machine run virus and spyware tools and with luck pull the bacon out of the fire. Trend housecall is excellent. Scan for sypware at the same time.

As for AV software; AVG antivirus is *very* good and free for home use.

No hassles, no spyware, anonymous use. I've installed in on countless machines over the last couple years.

Good luck.

You could try the following. Go to

download the free version of AVG, install it, run it and it will want to update itself. Let it, then do a complete scan. If it works, you've solved the problem, if it doesn't you've lost nothing except some net time. You don't need the CD for this.

AVG free is one of the best AV programs around, and its free for home use, and so are all the updates.

There are a number of boot disk images available on the web. You might need to make a bootable cd that contains the driver support to see the hard drive.

If you can see the hard disk you should be able to load and run AVG to clean up any existing viruses. You might also download Lavasoft Ad-aware. It picks up some of the spyware that the antivirus misses.

There is also a product called System Suite which has antivirus and firewall. I like the firewall because it will tell you if something is trying to communicate out of your system.

Trend Micro has an online virus scanner and some removers that are free to use.

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

Gunner Asch wrote:

Excellent web based one to run to check AVG hasn't missed one. I am with the guy who said mount it up in another PC, (2nd cable, DONT master/slave it, too many ways of getting it wrong) and grab her documents and virus scan it. Also run a good spyware scanner on her drive *after* the virus scan, It wont get the crud out of the registry while its drive D but will yank the executable out from under most of the nasties. At that point, with any luck it will boot its own box in safe mode so copy AVG installer and updated onto it while its the second drive and AdAware SE + its defs file (you also want also AUTORUNS from Sysinternals in case they have trouble) and boot it up in safe mode, install them and let them do their stuff. Autoruns can be used to kill stuff thats blocking the antivirus and antispyware apps if its really bad. Then Spybot S&D And/or Microsoft antispyware, leave one of them resident for protection and cross check for no viruses on Trend Micro's site. Full Windows Update, Rescan for spyware and preferably add a firewall better than the SP2 one, Install Mozilla or Firefox for web browsing and make it the default to reduce the risk of reinfection. She'll probably still need IE for some sites but it does reduce the number of 'driveby infections' you get. Also Mcafee have the NAI Stinger which is a standalone virus remover. Good if you get something AVG and Trend micro cant handle.

Dont take it away to fix, but burn the midnight oil on site. (easier to persuade her Peer2Peer stuff is *dangerous* and needs to be closely supervised and controlled if she sees you sweating over it) Then if it gets seriously reinfected you have the choice of getting her a Mac or just getting another girlfriend :-( [Extra *TOUGH* cost benefit analysis to do there ;-) ]

Metal working content? None except for the hunk of Dead Iron the OP is hopeing to salvage. Remember you only really own a computer if you own the OS installer on write protected media.