The beauty of my Virgin AMEX card is that as I spend I earn air miles for every pound spent. Being a Virgin card, these miles are redeemable only on Virgin Atlantic flights. But it just so happens that I love to travel AND I’m a big Virgin Atlantic fan, and choose to fly with them over other carriers (so long as they’re flying to where I want to get to, naturally). The Virgin AMEX White Card delivers 1 mile per pound spent, whilst the Virgin AMEX Black Card gives you 2 miles per pound spent. Virgin also have deals with a number of hotel chains and other organisations whereby you are credited with more miles per pound if you use your card to pay.

Downsides of the card is that you’re charged the interest on the full amount you’ve spent IF you fail to pay off the whole balance in a month, and the £115 annual fee on the AMEX Black. Good incentive to pay off the balance!

All good entertainment though

Having spent the last weekend working on a couple of machines, I thought it’d be useful to list my PC Toolkit, and I invite others to do the same! Now I realise these sort of posts are what were doing the rounds years earlier, but its still a valid topic today given the increased number of devices attached to the Internet, and the number of computer viruses totalling somewhere north of 1 Million.

Virus Scanning Utilities

My current resident favourite virus scanner is AVG (it should be noted, withOUT the LinkScanner utility).

I also back this up on potentailly infected systems with an on-line scanner, such as the Windows Live OneCare Virus Scanner, which works through the browser and various plugins / ActiveX controls.

Spyware Hunting Utilities

I regularly use that old chestnut (I say old, but its regularly updated) Spybot – Search & Destroy. It has a comprehensive database of potential spyware, and has hooks into the browser to try and protect against malware. It also can exclude cookies from your favourite ad serving and tracking platforms.

There’s also HijackThis which is useful to see whats buried in certain key parts of the hard drive and registry, and allows the user to disable or remove certain programs that may load with Windows or the browser.

System Tools

I’ve recently come to rely on the System Rescue CD, which contains a CD-Bootable verison of Linux with lots of useful tools for checking hard drives, working with HDD partitioning, copying – and even rescuing – data from damaged partitions. It provides utilities to handle secure deletion of data should you want to dispose of an old hard drive. I recently used this set of tools to copy a working Vista installation on a partition which contained damaged sectors to an external hard drive (connected via USB) which would soon replace the internal drive.

NTFSCLONE, NTFSINFO & NTFSTRUNCATE to the rescue!

I used to be a big fan of PartitionMagic, but a) it’s commercial software which requires a license, and b) I’ve had a few instances of it crashing mid-operation and destroying my data (thank you back-ups!). Granted, free software can do the same, but I’ve yet to have an issue with any of the utils on the System Rescue CD.

Process & Network Safety

When checking out a potentially infected PC, whats the best way to do it?
Well, I initially run HiJackThis from a known-clean USB key to get a handle on whats on the machine, and clean what I can.
I then uninstall any virus checking software on the machine, install a fresh copy of AVG (again, from a clean USB), ensure the latest virus definition updates are on it, and then do a full system scan.
Once this has completed, then I connect it to the Internet and run a second virus scan, this time using a different tool (e.g. MS OneCare).

How I also connect the PC via a separate network to the rest of my machines / smartphones etc. I have a Draytek 2820 Router which provides my ADSL connection. This has the ability to create up to 4 separate WiFi networks, each of which can be isolated from each other, and even individual machines on the same WiFi connection.
I also use the firewall abilities of the Draytek to ensure common trouble ports are blocked, e.g. TCP Port 25, Port 443 etc, to stop rouge activity potentially taking place whilst the PC is active on the Internet. Not ideal, I know. I’d rather have all ports except port 80 blocked, but I don’t see how the Draytek can allow this to happen (without setting up heaps of rules).

Anyway, thats the basic methodology. Thus far, its enabled me to clean out all detected trojans and viruses, even if it takes a few reboots and scans in order to do so.

So, does anyone have any suggestions / better tools or techniques for recovering a damanged or infected system?

I used to blog about my experiences with MythTV, amonst other things, but due to work and continutally getting the work / life balance wrong, I left it slip in favour of getting things done.

So now its fast approaching the middle of 2009; my life is somewhat more organised, and I’m setting up this site using WordPress to see what this modern blogging tool can do, and to see where this blog can take me…

Stay tuned.