Vista Reinstall = Program Files(x86) What the?

So I had a bunch of viruses and disfunction with my computer and decided to format and reinstall Vista. I did this with mixed results and thought I should post here before posting in the Malware forum.

The thing I've noticed is that there's now two Program Files folders. One of them(I'm guessing the older one) just says "Program Files" and now the new one, which every new program I install goes to, says "Program Files(x86)."

There's another issue as well. The harddrive is reading as far more full it is.

Is this a sympton of a bad install or me being an idiot or is there Malware somehow left over from the formatting process?

Thanks in advance peeps! Love ya.

 

Greetings, chillavilla...

The "Program Files/Program Files(x86)" folders are normal - you probably just didn't notice them before (64-bit applications use the Program Files folder, and 32-bit apps use the 'x86')...

As far as the hard drive space: what makes you think the drive is reading incorrectly? You might try installing CCleaner, let it do its thing, and see if there's a difference...

AFAIK, no malware can survive a format, unless it's boot-sector related, and you're not displaying boot-sector symptoms...

 

Thanks for the reply!

I use to have XP on another computer and when I formatted it, EVERYTHING would be erased. Also I could format it from C:/ but now with Vista I need the Vista disk to format and reinstall, and when I formatted it, it told me it would keep my old files. I wanted to nuke everything to make sure everything was gone.

My computer is running superslow(this is from right after the reinstall). It's an HP Pavillion dv9417ca Notebook with 2 gigs of ram 86.6 gigs free of a 140 gig harddrive(from what Vista reads, obviously without Vista on here it's a bigger harddrive, technically it was sold to me as 160 gigs). I believe the processor is an AMD Turion 64x2.

The computer sounds like it's constantly loading stuff even though I'm running basic firefox and have a couple of folders open with nothing running. It doesn't make sense to be constantly making this noise.

And I can't find how I'm using 53 gigs of harddrive.

 

I would suggest that when you reinstalled Vista has kept the old installations and therefore the physical layout of your hard drive would mean that the new install has placed itself around the outside edge of the drive, meaning that the drive needs to do more work to find your files, although this difference should only be a few milliseconds.

It may also be that whatever viruses you had in the old install, if that has remained (there should be a folder called windows.old), have managed to come back and reinfect.

My solution would be to download gparted (here: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/) to completely format your hard drives and then reinstall from a clean drive.

GParted is extremely easy to use. You download the file which comes in .iso format and you use vista's built in ISO burner to burn it to a CD or DVD. You then place it in your CD drive, make sure the BIOS is set to boot from CD, and then it loads. You then ask it to format the drive with Vista on it (It will do NTFS if you change the file system dropdown) and then reboot, place the Vista disk in the drive, and install a "custom" rather than an "upgrade" install.

 

SWEET!

Sounds good man. I'm going to do that. Thanks a ton!

 

Hey it worked perfectly! Computer is running clean and smooth baby. So much joy in my heart. That crap was weighing me down.

Thankyou thankyou thankyou!

 

No problem, glad we got it working for you.