I'm talking about computer viruses. Share your experiences on how you discovered it and how you got rid of it.

My first "real" system was a dx2 66MHz. Bought it for $1200 from a local shop - custom built. I was new to the digital world. This was before the internet was in homes. BBS's were the rage. For months, I couldn't use my floppy drive. Data was getting corrupted and I had so many dent marks in my drywall from throwing 3.5' disks.

I downloaded a copy of F-Prot for DOS from a BBS in Finland. I had the "NATAS" virus. Took a antivirus floppy to where I bought my system and had the owner check his floor models. Sure enough, they were all infected. Bastard.

Many many years later when I was doing in home computer repairs, I had a senior citizen call me. Old frail woman. She really only had a puter for solitaire. She called me one evening... "Hi Jeff, I think I have a virus". She was about 90 years old and really didn't know anything about computers. (bless her heart for trying) As a young tech I rolled my eyes thinking that she's going to tell me she lost her shortcut on her desktop so she assumes she had a virus. "Well Jeff it's rather odd", in a frail voice, "all my desktops are going around and around like my toilet water and won't stop, I can't click on anything it's making me dizzy." While I forget the virus, it was around the Melissa era, I couldn't charge her to fix this because the amount of laughter it provided was payment enough.

To be honest ive really only been infected once. And it was when i first bought my own personal computer. Turned out i downloaded a "flash update" from this flash gaming site i always visited (and yes it was a video game site) and sure enough someone hacked the server and uploaded this nasty little bugger. :/ As me being a computer repair tech I always see the same viruses. "Rogue" ,Windows 7 Security, Spybot Platinum, Registery Booster+, etc.

I first act by disabling it when start up appears by running run>msconfig and unchecking it. If the virus is covering up Admin rights i pull up task manager and look for odd services running and kill that task. Even the anti-viruses too. Majority of the time its a anti-virus too. :( lol. Then i throw in my super secret tool to remove the rest of the crap. lol. :)

For years I had a floppy setup with my assembly tools to take apart an infection and I would put a floppy into any machine I came across in an attempt to catch something but I had no luck. By the time I finally did catch a virus I no longer had a machine that could read the floppy. It was on an old machine I had picked up to reimage, I was copying some files to another DOS machine when the virus message popped up, after so many years of never finding anything I hadn't bothered to check the "new machine". Luckily it was a very old virus and the 2 machines that were involved were not networked and both reimaged quickly. One is now long gone and the other is my MS-BOB demo machine.