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otowi, you are right. But I view my computers as hobbies...projects. I love to mess and fiddle with stuff. I don't want it to be too easy, as silly as that sounds. I like to learn. I do experience some frustration at times, but I wouldn't trade that for something that I can't get in and take apart and put back together...
The computer I have, and two others in my household, I built myself. I have an excellent grasp on hardware...it's software and programming I'm not as strong with. I can usually figure out a fix on these kinds of issues, it just takes me time and fiddling about.
I'm actually debating maybe replacing my hard drive with an SSD anyhow. It might be a good time to consider doing this. Newegg is having a nice Memorial Day sale...
poolphreak: THANK YOU for the very thorough response. I have zero wish for you to give me a "TL;DR" version, I have issues with brevity myself and no complaint about your long reply. I read it. I get it. I appreciate it.
Issues I have...
I have reason to believe this thing might spread via USB (copying somehow to writable drives) yet unlike a virus I finally kicked years ago, there is no hidden .exe file (or other weird hidden files of unknown type or purpose) on USB devices that can simply be deleted. I switched from a Norton product to Avast early this year, and I run Malwarebytes and Spybot S&D. None have come up with anything more insidious than a couple of tracking cookies. Yet I have a problem. Thus, I worry about using a USB form of backup. Suppose I scan it and nothing is found, but something is there...then I reformat, and as soon as I plug in the USB and a read/write drive is detected and fired up, whatever bug was living on it decides to replicate to my nice clean HDD..? Most everything I need can be had from the web, or from program disks that I own. My media lives in redundant locations in the cloud, and I hope it is less of a risk to pull files back from cloud storage than it is off a USB device like an external hard drive or any kind of flash memory.
As for emails and popups...I do know better than to click links in emails. I never had popups until this thing really got started, at which point it was already doing its dirty work in my machine. What I wonder about are some of these "share me" sites that keep being spread on social media. I've been guilty of the semi-frequent viewing of "Top 20 hilarious autocorrect" or "World's funniest cat video" etc type things, viralnova, buzzfeed, cracked and the like...I wonder if perhaps those sites are not all that safe. Seems to me that just like a chain letter, things that beg to go viral and be spread all over should be regarded with a bit of suspicion on principle. Y'know?
poolphreak: THANK YOU for the very thorough response. I have zero wish for you to give me a "TL;DR" version, I have issues with brevity myself and no complaint about your long reply. I read it. I get it. I appreciate it.
Issues I have...
I have reason to believe this thing might spread via USB (copying somehow to writable drives) yet unlike a virus I finally kicked years ago, there is no hidden .exe file (or other weird hidden files of unknown type or purpose) on USB devices that can simply be deleted. I switched from a Norton product to Avast early this year, and I run Malwarebytes and Spybot S&D. None have come up with anything more insidious than a couple of tracking cookies. Yet I have a problem. Thus, I worry about using a USB form of backup. Suppose I scan it and nothing is found, but something is there...then I reformat, and as soon as I plug in the USB and a read/write drive is detected and fired up, whatever bug was living on it decides to replicate to my nice clean HDD..? Most everything I need can be had from the web, or from program disks that I own. My media lives in redundant locations in the cloud, and I hope it is less of a risk to pull files back from cloud storage than it is off a USB device like an external hard drive or any kind of flash memory.
As for emails and popups...I do know better than to click links in emails. I never had popups until this thing really got started, at which point it was already doing its dirty work in my machine. What I wonder about are some of these "share me" sites that keep being spread on social media. I've been guilty of the semi-frequent viewing of "Top 20 hilarious autocorrect" or "World's funniest cat video" etc type things, viralnova, buzzfeed, cracked and the like...I wonder if perhaps those sites are not all that safe. Seems to me that just like a chain letter, things that beg to go viral and be spread all over should be regarded with a bit of suspicion on principle. Y'know?
I think if you format your drive and start with a clean machine, you should be ok. This way you're scanning your usb drive with a known clean machine.
The problem with viruses/malware/spyware/adware, is that they can put their tentacles all over your machine. A virus remover may remove parts of it, or most of it, but it may miss one of those tentacles. Or you never know what a virus has already done to files on your pc, especially important system files. You make catch it after the fact and even remove all of it, but you're never sure if it hasn't already modified/deleted/infected other files. You might remove it, and everything seems fine. But you never know what it's exactly done already and a new problem might crop up months later.
From my experience, it's always best to reformat if you have ran into a serious virus/malware. Years ago, I used to take the approach of trying to remove all traces of a virus/malware and fix it without reformatting. I would research the virus, find out exactly what it did, where it did it, removed hundreds of registry entries, search for files and remove, replace .dll files with known good ones. But that approach would not prove feasible as the virus/malware/spyware/adware infections got more and more advanced. I would end up spending hours and hours removing something, because of all the time needed to research/disinfect and the worst, the ungodly time needed to do multiple full system scans.
I finally decided it was much better to just wipe their machine clean and reinstall everything. Most people were still using their original manufacturer system image and had years of abuse to their Operating System. Programs installed that they never used, or installed and uninstalled, viruses/malware that had infected and been somewhat removed. Over time, files can get corrupted, remenents of files can be everywhere, some of which try to still load when windows starts. Files can get fragmented and bits of the file can be scattered all over your drive. I recommend anyone that has had their same installation of windows for several years, to have their machine wiped clean and reinstalled. You're going to notice a difference.
One more thing... viruses that get launched, by whatever method, a lot of time will create a temp folder or extract directly into your temp folder and then launch some other file and do their business. I would regularly delete contents in your temp folder. A few files won't delete because they are open files, but that's normal. Also, hold down your Shift key when you hit delete, so they're permanently deleted, not just sent to the recycle bin. In Windows 7, that folder is located at...
C:\Users\whatever_your_user_is\AppData\Local\Temp
System restore can be a hindrance to getting rid of viruses. In that it comes as being on by default and is always creating restore points. A lot of time if you scan and remove a virus and everything is fine, days later suddenly your virus scanner is alerting you of removing another one, then another one. That's because the virus is still being stored in your System Restore archives. If you get a virus, you can turn off system restore on all drives, then remove it and once your clean, you can turn it back on. If you turn System Restore off, it will delete the ability to ever return to earlier System Restore points. I just don't trust it anyways.... trying to go back in time to a earlier point.
I applaud you for your tenacity in trying to learn more about these issues and how to solve them. I also know people like you can also be at a higher risk of heart failure and elevated blood pressure and hair loss. You sound like someone that is approaching this on a more even keel. Some people that try to figure out these things go nuts, because they try to understand every facet of the whole process and end up letting it take over their lives.. lol. Myself, I have acquired so much knowledge because it's my personality to understand why things happen. It's not enough to solve a issue for me, I have always striven to find out why it happened in the first place. In that same vein, it's also important on knowing when to abandon learning why, because you may never find out why. So cheers to you for putting in the time to figure out what's going on.
Well, I've decided to make the move down there to "the Springs" in a couple of weeks, so I'll try and be a active member of this forum later on. Right now, I'm trying to do my due diligence and read older threads so I might be able to answer a lot of my questions without starting new threads. Once I get settled somewhere, I will start opening myself up to some side jobs involving computer repair and the like. I've worked with computer repair businesses before years ago and was appalled at what they were charging people. 70-80 bucks a hour. I enjoy helping people and not hosing people. Many years ago, I set a rate that was never more than 75 bucks total. On reformatting and reimaging pcs, you can easily put in 10 hours, with all the time backing up hundreds of gigs of files, all the time installing updates and reinstalling core programs, rebooting all the time, restoring those hundreds of gigs back. But hey, I'm just a nice guy that uses his knowledge and experience to help others. Funny I've never met a mechanic that did that What person in their right mind would work 10 hours for 75 bucks doing specialized work? I do that with my other love too... playing pool. But just like pool, every person knows someone who can "fix computers". You know the saying "Knows just enough to be dangerous". Guys typically are born with the ability to know everything about pool, know how to make every shot, what shot is the correct one to shoot. They may be able to fool many people, but some of us know the real deal. We know that hard shot they just pulled out of their azz, I could setup and let them have a 100 shots at it and they would never duplicate it again.
How long do you guys think a computer should last?
Well, that's a kind of hard question to answer, but working with them for the past 3 decades, they are pretty resilient. For what some people use them for (strictly to read email, browse a few websites, look at pics and videos) then they could last quite awhile. What others may use them for, it may be shorter.
Processing power and memory, combined with the bloat of software apps and the Operating System, I would say about 5-7 years. Software apps continue to get more and more bloated with extra junk and are geared to taking advantage of newer technology, so they can run slower on older pc's.
The hardware is what you can never count on. I've bought brand new parts and had ones that fail upon installation or in a week or two. Or they can last for quite some time. I can tell you the parts that are most likely to fail. Which would be the power supply probably in the lead as the part most likely to fail first. CPU fans or case fans or fans on video cards would be next. Hard drives, CD/DVD's or motherboards would be last. Losing any of the aforementioned parts would not be a big blow to someone, except if it's a hard drive. All of your personal files on located on the hard drive, so if you don't back up your data, you could lose all of your data with a hard drive failure. If you hear some click, click, clicks and your machine won't boot, you should be worried.
Most manufacturers are installing integrated motherboards, meaning the video,audio,network,wireless,firewire and other components, are all part of your motherboard/systemboard. So if that component dies, it's possible to buy whatever failed and install it in a empty PCI slot. Problem is, they don't have many empty slots available anymore on current motherboards.
If your computer is meeting your needs, I would think you could continue to use it until something major dies on it. If you're more into the keeping up with the Jones, maybe every 5-7 years you could think about replacing it. With desktop pc's being so cheap, what's 3 or 4 hundred bucks every 6 years or so?
Laptops are a little different. They obviously take more abuse and are handled a lot more than a desktop. Their parts are also more expensive both in terms of the part itself and the labor required to replace them. With a laptop, if a integrated part dies, you have to replace the whole systemboard, you can't add the part in a slot, because they don't have any. They make the DVD/memory and hard drives fairly easy to replace, but anything with the motherboard, you're going to have to take apart the entire laptop. LCD screens go out most frequently, along with keyboards or the mousepad. Laptops are pretty cheap nowadays too, so if a major component goes out, you may want to entertain the thought of getting a new one if you've got several years out of it already. Parts that go out most frequently on laptops, are the AC adapters, keyboards, the AC power supply connector (gets wiggled back and forth till it doesn't make a good connection), and LCD screens.
The other issue I've seen with laptops that makes me scrunch my eyebrows is heat. It's a lot harder to cool parts in such a small space, properly.
Of course now a lot of people I know are replacing laptops with tablets.
As for stress...once in a while I get flustered, it's usually when my sons are coming to me for tech support. The worst is the stinking X-Box, I'm so sick of these game consoles, they irritate me more than anything! With my computer, if I can simply do some function that needs done on another machine in the house, then while I will put some thought and time into understanding and solving an issue, but I don't consider it hugely urgent. I'll get it fixed when I get around to it. If that means I'm annoyed and it's time to walk away and read a book or something, that's fine.
I built my PC in late 2010...at the time the parts were not quite bleeding edge, but not far off. I took a step back for budget reasons on a few things. i5 instead of i7. GTX 560 Ti video card, just one and not SLI. Of course the build was a lot easier than I thought it might be (it was my first) so I modded out the case a whole bunch with weird sculpture and lights and things. At the time I played World of Warcraft, but I ditched that bad habit a couple of years ago. The only thing that's held back my WEI is the hard drive, which is just a fairly standard Western Digital black. Thing is, now that I've pretty much given up gaming, while the techy geek in me is twitching to install something better, the accounting nerd in me says it's a highly unneccesary expenditure, even if it IS on sale... One thing is for absolutely certain though. I will never, ever buy a pre-built desktop PC again as long as I live. I scoff at the offerings in places like Best Buy. Feh.
Oh, and about pool...so you're moving to the Springs and ya shoot pool, huh...and you're techy on top of that...interested in joining an APA team? We've been talking about getting our old Friday night team back up sometime and we have a couple spots that aren't spoken for... I'm not a great player, personally, but I enjoy it quite a lot. Seems I either shoot like a complete noob, or like a genius, depending on the night. But our Captain, Mark, is quite good. Feel free to friend request or PM me about that, Greg!
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. You sound like someone that is approaching this on a more even keel. Some people that try to figure out these things go nuts, because they try to understand every facet of the whole process and end up letting it take over their lives.. lol. Myself, I have acquired so much knowledge because it's my personality to understand why things happen. It's not enough to solve a issue for me, I have always striven to find out why it happened in the first place. In that same vein, it's also important on knowing when to abandon learning why, because you may never find out why. 
So cheers to you for putting in the time to figure out what's going on.
What person in their right mind would work 10 hours for 75 bucks doing specialized work? I do that with my other love too... playing pool. But just like pool, every person knows someone who can "fix computers". You know the saying "Knows just enough to be dangerous". Guys typically are born with the ability to know everything about pool, know how to make every shot, what shot is the correct one to shoot. They may be able to fool many people, but some of us know the real deal. We know that hard shot they just pulled out of their azz, I could setup and let them have a 100 shots at it and they would never duplicate it again.
