Scott L
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Feb 29, 2000
- Messages
- 4,457
So my buddy's sister is out of town and he invited some people over to hang out, he told me to take a look at the puter since he noticed some wacky things about it. After trying to get to my email I was about to recommend a full re-install of XP, it was that bad.
Pressing ctrl+al+del showed the task manager for 1 sec before closing again, telling me there was a virus or two on the system. I used my online account to install McAfee antivirus which found 150 individual problematic files, with *5* seperate viruses on her one system. Fixed that.
Then onto the spyware... downloaded and ran the latest build of Spybot first which turned over a hundred files as well. Then Ad-Aware which found close to a hundred. About an hour and a half later I wanted to run Windows Update but noticed the system was dragging. Checked the HD and it needed to be defragged badly. Set the pagefile to 766mb (windows recommended) and let it spin.
Watched Family Guy episodes with buddies, checking back an hour later. Defrag was done and ran Win Update, they didn't have SP1 yet along with all the recent worm fixes so grabbed those.
Also got rid of their Kazaa in favor of Klite K++, still noticed some weird advertisement pop-up windows I've never seen before. The title bars said Messenger but shutting MSN Messenger down didn't fix it. Ran a Google search and found out there's another program in XP called Messenger, having nothing to do with MSN chat. I went into the Services settings, disabled it, and set it to manual in case it was needed in the future. Finally free of all spyware/pop-ups.
3 hours later and the computer is about 3x as fast, much less clutter, and virus protected. I wonder just how many systems are exactly like hers or worse?
Oh, and do you think she'll go out with me now?
Pressing ctrl+al+del showed the task manager for 1 sec before closing again, telling me there was a virus or two on the system. I used my online account to install McAfee antivirus which found 150 individual problematic files, with *5* seperate viruses on her one system. Fixed that.
Then onto the spyware... downloaded and ran the latest build of Spybot first which turned over a hundred files as well. Then Ad-Aware which found close to a hundred. About an hour and a half later I wanted to run Windows Update but noticed the system was dragging. Checked the HD and it needed to be defragged badly. Set the pagefile to 766mb (windows recommended) and let it spin.
Watched Family Guy episodes with buddies, checking back an hour later. Defrag was done and ran Win Update, they didn't have SP1 yet along with all the recent worm fixes so grabbed those.
Also got rid of their Kazaa in favor of Klite K++, still noticed some weird advertisement pop-up windows I've never seen before. The title bars said Messenger but shutting MSN Messenger down didn't fix it. Ran a Google search and found out there's another program in XP called Messenger, having nothing to do with MSN chat. I went into the Services settings, disabled it, and set it to manual in case it was needed in the future. Finally free of all spyware/pop-ups.
3 hours later and the computer is about 3x as fast, much less clutter, and virus protected. I wonder just how many systems are exactly like hers or worse?
Oh, and do you think she'll go out with me now?