LAST EDITED ON Jul-14-04 AT 07:26 AM (Pacific)Ouch. That sucks. First, a few hints on keeping your PC healthy, not-so-wealthy, and wise.
Get Ad-Aware and Spybot, run them both on a regular basis. Zone Alarm has a very good free firewall. AVG anti virus, even if you have Norton. In fact, drop Norton, it's not as good, and it's a resource hog. If you do drop Norton, consider getting another freeware antivirus. I don't and have never had a problem, but it's up to you. I know someone who has three Anti-viruses, two Firewalls, and doesn't use IE. Mozilla is a good start. Finally, spend a little money on a few dozen floppies, and regularly back up documents, source code, and small downloaded programs such as UGE. I have UGE and a relatively large number of modules (some of which I wrote) on a single disk, along with a number of docs.
As for UGE, I got my copy (one day, long long ago, in a universe far from here) from one of the mass gaming sites. Avault, HappyPuppy, XCheater, or Megagames. It's been a while. There are/were other sites you can check out as well. You may also want to try Gamehippo and www.download.com, though I can't say if either site will have an availiable copy. Ultimately, if you can't find it, send me an email at domhnall4h@hotmail.com, and I'll dig the disk out, and send it on down the line.
"There's always room for jello. So says DOOM!"
http://personal.tmlp.com/overkill/uge/mainprog.htm
Found it here. Just to be on the safe side, I've downloaded the zip to my work computer, so I know I'll have a copy somewhere. I'll download it to my notebook when I get home.Doom: Yes, those are all good suggestions. A lot of these things I didn't have to worry about when I didn't have a working wireless card. (Much like one needn't fear being murdered when you're the only inhabitatant of a deserted island.) Now that I have a working wireless card . . . . As spiderman would say, "With great power comes great vulnerability." Or something like that. I am getting eTrust (anti-virus) and Pest Patrol (spyware/adware). I'm hoping that will do me.
Backing up is always good advice. Although in some respects, I don't mind a fresh start. Some of what I lost I won't miss, and a lot of the rest I am going to enjoy re-creating - especially now that I have a macro program to speed generate wizardry characters.
Another good idea is to get a good free drive imaging program. Regularly image your drive and back up the image to a CD or DVD.That way if somehting like that happens instead of relying on the stupid windows restore point you can just erase your HD and then restore the image.
Do some google searches, theres some good free ones out there.