pappas44

Hi everyone,

My name is Barry! and as you can see from my tittle I'm from southern Ontario, Canada located in a natural snowbelt. I'm not a geek per say but if you were to ask my family, they would probably tell you I spend a lot of my time in my computer room surfing on the computer. I started computing with a Commodore 64, then jumped up to a Amiga 128 (I still suck at Dos) and I first came on line with a dial-up modem pushing a whooping 14.4 kbit/s (2400 baud) on a smoking fast Pentium 100 with a 17" Mag monitor. It cost just over $5000.00 at the time with that huge monitor costing us $1700.00 alone but because of our sons handicap which affects his vision wedidn't have a choice(most of it was covered by a grant thank god). Wish I had that money now to spend on a system LOL, it would be smokin hot. After that we jumped to light speed on a new US Robotics 56k/33.6k external sportster modem (a black box worth $400.00+ with lights on the front as my wife called it). Now we are on the fastest connection in our rural area which is around 8gbit/s. If somebody said that I had to go back to dial-up then I think I would give up my computer (withdrawl symptoms would follow). LOL OK I'll stop there with the look back in time and step into the present. All these years and I've never come close to mastering computing. I do help friends with things like networking (limited as I myself use Network Magic) or whatever I can help with or at least point them in the direction of sites like yours so they can get proper help. I believe in the concept of paying forward especially when it comes to helping people. The reason why I have come to this site is twofold, 1st) for some Virus help. 2nd) for some computer learning. I am at the point that I would like to tackle building my own computer. I recently (Xmas) bought a new CPU which is an AMD Athlon 64 x2 6000 3.0 for my computer which has a AMD Athlon 64 x2 5000 2.6Ghz and with the help of people here (I hope) I would like to install it myself. First though I want to format my hard drive without losing to many programs. We have 3 old computers in the house that I would like to try and make one better machine from. Anyway dealing with problem one is my biggest priority. Our 19 yr. old son who is in a wheelchair was given a mp3 from one of his friends for Xmas, so we downloaded some songs for him ( rap crap) and this is where I believe we picked up the virus. I'm not sure if this virus is on his MP player, I hope not as I'm not at all sure how to deal with that or even if it's worth it as he has some money saved up to buy one and that might be the better route. Hopefully someone here will be able to clue me in on this also. I apologize for the long winded hello but I just like to let people know where I coming from. Could someone also give me a rough idea how long it takes for virus help, as I my son is driving me crazy every day about putting more songs on his mp3 player. I think I posted everything correctly with the proper files and attachments, but it almost seems that there skipping over me for some reason as I first posted on the 8th of January and then according to the information I posted a bump on 01-12-2009@ 08:13am. I'm not asking to jump the que (I realize their swamped) just asking for someone to check to make sure I posted it correctly. Thank You very much for any and all help.

simpswr

and welcome to the Forum

It all depends on how busy the security folks are . . It's first come . . first served.

carsey

Welcome to TSF

pappas44

Hi Simpswr!

Ok Thanks! I didn't think it was on a first come first served basis as others who have posted just today and I don't mean just a bump. I posted 9 days ago and I check 4-8 times per day so as not to make a moderator wait for my reply. I'm pretty sure I have posted everything that was asked from the instructions. I would like to bump again just in case I accidentaly got passed over, but it says not to bump more than once. And I won't pm the moderators as I don't want to bother them as I know their busy. Sorry I'm trying to be patient but it is hard as my son doesn't understand this he just thinks I'm ignoring him.

Cathy95820

Hi Barry Welcome to TSF!

pappas44

Thank You! for welcoming me.

kodi

Welcome to Tech Support Forum, hope you enjoy it here

chup

Welcome to TSF!
I hope you enjoy our community :)

vladimirb

Hello and welcome to TSF...

Tumbleweed36

Hello and Welcome to the forum, nice to see you here.

dai

hi and welcome to the forum

pappas44

Hi Eveeryone! And Thank You for the welcome!

Did any of that bring memories of yesteryear or am I oldest around here LOL

Glaswegian

Hi and welcome to the TSF family - glad you could join us.

5NIPER_WOLF

Not to be rude but, if your old enough to have children, why is your grammar so terrible? You have everything in one paragraph and your going slightly against TSF's rules for posting in introductions. Other than that, I laughed at your "blazing fast dial up" and "light speed with 56k" that was hilarious! And Pentium 1 at 100 Mhz? that is so slow, but my first PC was Pentium 2 at 333 Mhz with 64 MB of ram and that was okay for me. (this was mid 90's)

Now I started with 56k wireless so I'm not complaining but I absolutley respect anyone who has touched a Commodore 64 or 16. Also my mother said how she had to spend a huge ammount of money and had to take out a loan for a mid range computer in the 80's, she didn't know the specs or what it was called though but she said it was about 3,000 dollars Canadian.
When my mom spent $3,000 2 decades later (2002) For a Compaq Presario 6000, it was Pentium 4 2.0 Ghz, 256MB Ram, 80 GB 5,200 RPM, Nvidia Geforce 2 MX and I thought that was the fastest PC in the world!

pappas44

Hi 5NIPER WOLF
Thank You for Welcome!
And sorry for the bad grammar and breaking TSF rules. I did not think I was breaking any rules as it was an Introduction (long winded mind you) and maybe not Completely grammatically correct. LOL I usually have my daughter proof read most of my longer post but I was just trying to be friendly and let people know a little bit about me. Again I apologize for breaking any rules as this was not my intention.
If the moderator wants he may erase my post as per site rules.

JohnthePilot

Hi Barry. Welcome aboard.
I can't see that you've broken any rules. I can also tell you that you have a long way to go to catch me up. Personal computers hadn't been invented when I started. Input was on punched cards and as for monitors, what are they?

pappas44

LOL Thanks JohnthePilot!

I remember them.... almost forgot about them. They are older than me though, I beleive.

speedster123

greetings

5NIPER_WOLF

Oh well then your grammar is understandable - and as for you breaking the rules, it's my bad, I thought you were asking questions for some problems but you were merely pointing that you need help on those things, sorry about that! I guess I'm too jumpy. And to make it up I can help you with a problem- you said you think had a virus on your handicapped son's MP3 player right? well the chances of that are quite small and the chances of it doing damage are even smaller.

{Deleted P2P references}

The most probable situation is that you already had a virus but did not know about it, if it's on your son's MP3 player than it's best to plug it in and scan the whole MP3 Player for viruses (I know Avast and AVG have this feature), to avoid possible contamination of another computer.
Also I don't think you need to reformat your hard drive just to install a new processor, but why did you buy an Athalon 6000 when you had 5000? the increase of performance will be almost unnoticeable, you should have gotten maybe a Phenom x2 or something or at least overclock your new 600 to 3.5 GHZ or even just overclock you 5000 to 3.1 GHZ (as those are the most logical clock rates). Again sorry for my mistake on your post!

pappas44

@5NIPER WOLF
Apology accepted.
As far as the hard drive goes I like to format my main hard drivesabout once a year. It can be a pain in the butt to do but it is nice to get the computer back to it's original state.
Sometimes the computer just works better that way I feel with all the old stuff and leftover bits wiped off it. I have done this at least every two years in the past and it has seemed to serve me well.
As far as the cpu purchase I noticed afterwards that I kinda messed up even to the point that I was worried that it would make my computer slower. Once I have them help me remove the virus in the virus section then I will be visiting the differant areas of this site for help and ideas on the cpu install.
Thank You for the information on my sons mp3 player, as I was thinking of scanning it but wasn't sure who offered that for free. Can't wait to get my virus dealt with so I can move onto my cpu and explore more areas of this site. Talk to you later.