Some people take this topic very seriously. It can take several hours out of your work day and in rare occurances, force your hand to buy another computer. From the I.T. professionals stand point.. what should you do?
Reinstall windows. you won't lose any of your important files. If you feel that you might, invest in a cheapo external hard drive or larger thumb drive. Even in the worst situations you can get to safe mode and get the files you need off. Seriously thats it. What if you don't want to reinstall windows? Then you're a pussy. But there is a way.
Having been very bored in middleschool, my friends and I would give each other hard to find Macinosh virus programs. The nastier the better. It was part of a game to remove them, pass them on. When we moved to windows based computers, nothing changed.. with the exception of the odd virus you're friends did not give you. This was before a really good working Norton, or Kaspersky. This was way before the days of ALG free virus scanner. None of these work 100%, and the only thing that does is a manual removal, or a clean reinstall.
I'm going to give you the best advice ever. Back up your files. Buy an up-to-date copy of windows. Keep an extra external sata hardrive for your laptop or PC around. It's a $40 investment, that can minimize your downtime to an hour or less. Take your replacement drive, hook it up, install windows to it, then put your old one back in. When that one dies or takes a dump, pop in your preinstalled windows hardrive and never miss a beat. When you get around to it, wipe the old one and use it as your new back up. Or toss it. Personally, i pick a day on the weekend and just wipe it. Gone are the days of spending multiple hundreds of dollars on hardware. Use this to your advantage, buy cheap, keep backups. Hell, i have multipule computers laying around just in case.
