Hi,

I was just eating my late meal, and I have now recalled what this one was. It was OMRICON.

I booted up one day to be presented with a black screen, with small white script in the middle which said, 'You seen to have an excess of Omricon particles, format your hard drive'. I tried every method that I was knowing to get this to go, but ended up doing as it said.

I am going back to three years ago, but has any one had this, or is knowing of this virus?

Soviet:thumbup:

Hi good old soviet here,

I forgot to mention that some good did come out of this, as I decided to scrap the celeron motherboard which was running Windows Millennium and upgrade to a Gigabyte P4 Titan mother board type GA-81848P775-G which was with in my price range, and I went for a 3.2 GHz Pentium processor. I then ordered a OEM Windows XP, as the old celeron was not fast enough to run this.

I bought all of this from Micro-direct of Manchester which is an excellent place, that I always buy from, and very competitive price wise. I added 512 MB of ram which I bought from Crucial, which is another first class Company. I really wish that I had added a bigger Ram at the time, as I now feel that I need it to aid performance. I also added a second hard drive, a sata 320 g byte.

I agonised for ages as to whether to go for a Pentium board or an AMD, and now I think that an AMD would have been the better choice, as every one that I meet tells me that AMD is superior for an equal system in operation.

So who ever was the one that gave me the virus, stung me in to action to do my long promised up grade.

Any thoughts on which is superior, pentium or AMD?

Soviet:thumbup:

When I last upgraded I was faced with that very choice, but after looking at the AMD range I came to the conclusion that their roadmap was completely up the Swannee. There was no consistency, lots of processors that were treading on each others toes spec-wise and general confusion over which board was best suited to which chip. The Intels were very straightforward and for the use I intended (lots of heavy media - photshop, premiere, cubase, etc) the P4 of the time definitely had the edge over an equivalent AMD. The issue was that the P4 Prescott ran very hot compared to the AMDs and took a lot of extra cooling. I'd say that the AMD had the potential to be a better gaming chip but the dual cores were hobbled by lots of weird compatibility and performance issues. The confusion over the relative performance came from AMD moving to a performance index rather than quoting the clock speed outright because their chips worked in a very different way internally with regards to memory control and caching.

Nowadays I'd say that the Intel dual cores offer astonishing value for money, especially if you're prepared to clock them. I don't think there's anything in the AMD range that can keep up for the money. They're nicely engineered too and run very cool for the level of performance on offer.

Hi Interphase,

Very interesting to know that you went through the same decision making process. As you work in the profession, then you know your stuff, and this means that I was probably right to go for the Intel after all. The Prescott is expensive, I know, and also as you say needs a lot of cooling.

I need need to read up about clocking the duel core, as I am not very knowledgeable on this one, and all I know is that it has to be altered in the BIOS.

I would be a bit scared of messing up, if I am not sure, and causing damage.

Any way thanks for the interesting discussion. It is a good forum for learning from others, and is more convenient than encyclopedia.

Soviet

I have used Zonealarm and AVG for years and have never had any problems, even on this humble 1.4GHz Celeron M laptop :thumbup: