Finally Back, Serious PC Questions (Off-Topic)

by Morpheus , High Charity, Tuesday, February 07, 2017, 17:59 (2854 days ago)

It's been two long arduous months and my computer has finally been returned to me. I suffered through the worst customer experience of my life, and I have to pull everything together once again. I had to take my computer back to this worthless technician five times, each with the same problem. The symptom was the same each visit, but the cause always seemed to be something off the top of his head; he certainly made a point to openly blame me every single step of the way, accusing me of everything from downloading pirated content to singlehandedly dismantling my own computer to break it intentionally just to get free service.

Long story short, he eventually 'discovered' the real reason for my 1962: He claims that one of the programs I downloaded/installed had a virus that "knocked the drive out" and caused it to crash. Now yes, I am aware I had a lot of programs installed, but most of them(i.e. Steam Games, Microsoft Store, software websites) were direct, from trusted sites and not from 3rd-party mirrors. Anyway, he told me that the virus was embedded in one of my programs, and he didn't know which. He also told me that no virus scanner could find it, "being so deeply buried, even Microsoft wouldn't be able to find it".

I told him I have a copy of all my application setups on my external hard drive, and asked him why the virus wouldn't attack the external hard drives, and he said the virus would know the difference and would not activate until installed on an actual computer. He basically said the only way I could find out which program has a virus is after the virus attacks and destroys my computer again.

What he said seemed to make some sense, but then again this guy is a crook. What doesn't make sense is that out of all the programs I've installed over so many years and so many computers, I've never had a problem with any of them--I'm about 65% sure I didn't install any programs between November and December, when I first started getting these messages.

So is it true?

1) Can a virus differentiate between an external hard drive and an internal one and know when to strike?

2)Can nothing stop--or at least find--something like this??

3) Is it possible for a virus to have a "scheduled release"? Maybe something I installed a long time ago and only started attacking recently?

4) Can a virus really wipe out a whole operating system, and why?

5)Most importantly, is there really no other way to find out the identity/location of the virus than play Minesweeper with my applications and guarantee another two week billion dollar service by someone else?