On fixing my son's PC

K, so the manchilds pc dies about a month ago, and been tinkering it. It's a home built, so no recovery disk perse, I try the best defaults I know....half assed. It boots, everything spins up, but no desktop....windows pukes to dos mode or at best a safe mode screen........what could it be I ponder I reinstall windows over windows in an effort to not loose all.....twice, hoping to avoid the evil "format and start from scratch" thing. I do this twice...same result..that smiley "windows initialization error" black screen. What could it be, a bad memory stick? I ponder some more............ Finally, I consign myself to the long drawn out process of formatting, fresh install, but not from his room. I need it on my bench this move, it will be a long tedious search for obscure drivers. Wired to the KVM, I boot from a floppy and just before I invoke "fdisk", I ponder again, and decide one last run at safe mode. If nothing else, I'll get a list of hardware to search the net for the next few hours, looking for drivers...yay.. Easy enough, safe mode appears, video drivers first, as I grab pen and paper..WTF????? Hrrrrrmmmmmmm I think I see the problem now..... Fours later, proper video driver installed, a virus sweep, 12 bullshit malignant programs removed, disk defragmentation, etc.......I inform the boy his PC now resembles a working PC. All happy he asks, "so dad...what was wrong?" My answer..slow and steady.. Next time you dload "anything" from a site that ends in .ru .cz, my foot in your ass!!! :) He paused, knowing he was busted, and nodded. I think we both learned a lesson.......lol