This is just it. I used limewire for years and never got a virus. I was also not stupid enough to download "Brittany.Spears.Nude.Totally.Legit.Movie.avi.exe". It amazes me how completely blind some people are.
I was like 11 and had no idea wth i was doing. but i sure downloaded a lot of stuff from Limewire..."why the hell is the computer so slow all of a sudden?!"
I remember running the 2 command line McAfee scan and clean commands. And it would tell you scanning for 15 known viruses or something lol. Then it became hundreds and eventually just changed into the tsr apps running in the background all the time.
Generally just booting from a clean disk with clean on it would make you the PC repair god.
This hurts. I still remember when I rendered our first family PC unbootable. It was a Pentium II 266 with a tiny 3GB HDD running Windows 98, and apparently some sub folder of system32 seemed a good place to start doing some clean up to win back some extra space.
Turns out, it wasn't.
Now turns have tabled and I'm the stereotypical IT professional who helps out fixing PCs/smartphones
This is how I got so good at computer IT stuff as a kid. Had to constantly clear our family computer of viruses and reinstall windows multiple times a year because my brothers would always download shit like “The fast and the furious-no-virus.mpg.exe”
My god man. This brings back a traumatic memory of me bricking my now brother-in-laws PC by trying to torrent a cracked version of counter strike. I was young and dumb and panicked. Entire hard drive was wiped without chance to backup. 😩
not much use but you can actually still access files if they weren't written upon since they are still there and only the address was destroyed.
I did it once after accidentally wiping my hard drive and managed to get quite a lot of stuff back.
Oh god, this was me back when I was a kid (thankfully it was never permanently ruined). I also hid all my secret downloads in system32 so nobody would find them.
Mid 2000s? Say wut? I think lImewire was dead by the mid 2000s?
More like 2000-2002 just downloaded a pirated new movie only to realize the file was mislabeled and it wasn't what I was expecting and now I have to go ham on the hard drive with 00 buck shot.
This hits young me learning linux and dual booting straight in the feels. I can't even begin to count the amount of times I totally wrecked the family computer and had to reinstall windows from scratch.