i got lazy with some cracks and before you knew it, there was "your computer might be infected" right next to my windows clock. So, within 30 seconds the computer was restarted and a windows xp cd was in the drive, and i am currently formatting my drive. I estimate that within 3 hours I will have my computer back to my former glory.

How fast do you guys reinstall your shit?

So system restore would not fix that?

i dont like taking chances

If the computer is more infected than a terminal AIDS atient and the CPU is half decent it shouldnt take more than 45 minutes, maybe an hour if you include getting back ALL the essential apps.

I think I should make a backup of my windows partition with dd. That is about 75 gb right now, so next time I decide to wipe the drive i will do it. Maybe.

Yeah that's about right. Sometimes it takes more time to get the comp working exactly how you like it though. When my computer crashed it took me a few days to get it working to my standards. I was set back from having dial up though. I took my comp to a friend's house to get all the updates and driver revisions and shit.

Bloody ages.

Installing Windows and then all the programs takes maybe 2 hours. But the next bit is getting it just how I like it...customise toolbars in all the programs, tweak Windows options and so on. And that takes hours and hours.

Haha I'm with fuckin OP. As soon as shit starts going down, I don't even fuck with trying to fix it, just format that shit.

I have 3 computers, and I normally use one as the AIDS Torrent downloading computer and I scan everything before I let it through to my main rig, but when something slips through, I normally KNOW its a downward spiral, and I'll be formatting within the month.

Normally takes me quite a while to get all updates and find all my scattered programs I install.

Can't you do your exe poison testing in a virtual machine? You could copy the Hard Drive Document, making a backup take about 3 minutes.

When I used windows ME, about 2 days to get everything right again. That was about every 3 months, and I never had a virus, it was just that ME was complete crap.

With Linux, about 2-5 hours. That was when stuff was so messed up a reinstall was easiest, frequently.

I never had to reinstall a Mac. Apart from when my hard drive got super-aids, that took about a day to port everything over.

Common sense 2008. I mean fucking seriously, if you're going to be running sketchy software, run it in a sandbox. Get yourself a god damned copy of vmware.