Good News, Bad News

First the Good News.

I believe the PC which was whacked by a virus/trojan/bot last weekend, courtesy of a "driver site" is now back up and running having been seemingly "de-loused".

As it was still partially crippled, even after a Windows XP "repair" from the OEM CD, whilst I was driving up to the top of Scotland at the beginning of the last working week I figured that one way of dealing with the problem was to connect the affected PC's hard drive as an additional drive to a fully functioning PC, and to virus scan it from that PC.

This is what I did yesterday, and the virus scan found a few suspect files and zapped them.

Once the "cleansed" drive was reconnected to its proper PC and that was booted, it was immediately evident that the nasties had in fact been purged.

I then fixed the on board virus checker (this PC runs Microsoft Security Essentials) with a "hotfix" downloaded from Microsoft, and then let Windows Updater catch up with everything, including re-installing Service Pack 3.

I took the opportunity to vacuum out the PC, a Dell Dimension 3100, which always has been blissfully quiet and generally tidy up all the cabling associated with it, no trivial job I can assure you!

Anyhow, it all seems to be in reasonably fettle now, and I have once again started up my QRSS grabber, though I think I won't reinstate the Apache Web Server.

As part of the rescuing of the situation I moved all affected sites off site, and I will leave them there for the moment.

Now the Bad News.

On a whim, I extracted my TS-180S from the shed with a view to giving it a little exercise as it has been lying discarded for a few months.

To my horror upon firing it up I found I once again had a "dead" digital display.   The receiver is still working as it was when I put it to one side, but when last used it had a fully functioning display.   My favoured theory at the moment is that I disturbed some wiring when I tidied it all up before putting the covers on.  

Knowing the previous track record of this radio, that might be wishful thinking!

Bother ... !!