.....which one was it please and when ?
Did you also remember the Operating System ?
It can be also an Worm or some like that (as the SASSER one for example).
Summarized,some thing that made your Computer unusable.
Thank you for your experience.
It was Win95.Dir that I got through my own stupidity. I paid some dude at school to have his friend burn me a CD with games on, well the game I wanted to play the most had a virus on it, but I figured that my AV (which was McAfee at the time) would be able to disinfect it if I copied it to my PC first, since the CD was read only. Well, nothing happened when I copied it, I kind of expected my AV to detect it automatically.
Knowing a little bit about how AV software worked, but clearly not enough, I figured if I tried to run the game it would for sure block it and prompt to disinfect it. But it didn't block it, it just let me run it and then complained afterwards, at which point it was already too late.
The virus made my PC unstable, error messages on every boot, McAfee was constantly showing me BSOD-style error messages about a virus detected which didn't help matters much as it was completely unable to do anything about it, and the PC would occasionally crash, but it was still somewhat usable, so I kept using it to play my games and such until my uncle helped me reinstall Windows on it. That PC had Windows Me on it but my uncle put Windows 98 on it, which I didn't exactly mind. I didn't hate Win Me, it's not as bad as people seem to think, but it sure wasn't much of an improvement.
This was when I was around 11, so around 2002, had no internet to speak of, so I was very much new to the world of piracy, that CD was the first time I was ever able to get pirated games other than some bootlegs my dad bought in Asia, and I knew I wouldn't be able to get that game otherwise and I really wanted to play it so I thought it was worth the risk. But it wasn't.