Posted: 8/5/2011 6:53:20 PM EDT
the daughter shows up at our house with her Toshiba Satellite L505 laptop. As with any 22 year old girl who pretty much lives for the day not thinking too much about tomorrow and of course her one year old laptop is full of crap!!!!!  I have never seen so much crap in my entire life on a laptop. You cannot move the mouse without stupid pop up crap coming on the screen. So many programs that her and her so called friends have added on but she has no idea what they do .
I am a Mac guy so PC's ain't my thing but being a Dad who tries to help out his daughter, I am looking for advice. My thinking is lets blow this thing up and start up all over from scratch. She does not have a recovery disk so I am thinking I need to make one? But I am clueless so is there someone out there who can give me some points on the best way to do this?? I am guessing she may have some documents and pics she wants to save and I can stick them on a flash drive until I get a clean slate going. Any help would be greatly appreciated 
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Try downloading and running the Microsoft malicious software removal tool first or running a system restore to a point before the problems started. Some of the current bugs out there will restrict you from creating a recovery disk or running a sysem restore. Save what you can to an external while you still can. Don't back-up any downloaded media unless it was a legit purchase...I tunes et al. Run anything you are going to back up through a malware scan first, you can get these tools for free on M-softs website. Be careful where you download them from and check the url..... If you can't create a recovery disk you can contact M-soft and they'll mail you a copy of the windows os the laptop is running. You'll need the windows serial# for that and will probably have to put up with a 20 minute conversation with someone in a call center in India. Reinstalling the os will wipe the problems clean but will also wipe everything else.
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oh yeah.....
A quick fix that works sometimes: You can create a new user profile on the PC and lock the infected one. Transfer admin privs to the new profile and change the infected one to a password protected account that doesn't get opened. This might help band-aid the problem until you get your recovery disk in the mail. |
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Do you just want to clean up the drive and defrag it?.... what os is she running...? Windows 7 tried a clean up and defrag but that really did not take care of the problems. Defrag won't help a malware infection. Defrag cleans up your storage space. Sort of like alphabetizing your files.... If you've got random pop-ups your browser is probably hijacked and even re-routing your google searches. Be sure you guys don't do any banking or bill paying from that computer until things are cleared up. |
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My win 7 has a partition on drive D " recovery ". If you don't know how to get there, check the recycle bin... look for the drives. Hopefully a reload won't wipe out his drivers... Probably will....but that's the least of his worries. A service pack download will replace most of the drivers he'll need. The rest can easily be found online, printer drivers. devices, etc... |
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I'll tell you what the first thing I would do. Start button Run enter: msconfig Go to startup tab DISABLE ALL. enter. reboot.... then when the little window pops up ( after reboot ) put a check in " dont tell me again ". It will cut all the shit out that's running in the background. Try this before you start hackin', it may work just fine... .After that, I'd suggest downloading the free version of Ad-aware ( to remove suspicious crap ) |
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Quoted: My win 7 has a partition on drive D " recovery ". If you don't know how to get there, check the recycle bin... look for the drives. Hopefully a reload won't wipe out his drivers... Windows 7 has most of the drivers you need. If he burns a recovery disk, it'll have the drivers. |
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IMO, anything less than a full format+ fresh install is half assing it, and the half assed approaches are usually more difficult and less reliable. This. For sure. Like I said before though: If the bug(s) keep him from burning the recovery discs he can still get a new Windows disc from Microsoft. |
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More than likely the startup tab is LOADED with megashit tons of garbage running in the background. He just wants her stuff to run, and this is a shortcut saving whatever Toshiba drivers and crap are on her PC. If the msconfig helped, then I'd go back in, and clean the drive - then defrag. I think the morans at the gEEk sQuAd charge 150 bucks to do the same thing... |
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If you have a even a modicum of computer knowledge, you can start with this, it's an iso that you'll need to burn onto a disc (using another computer)
http://www.avg.com/us-en/avg-rescue-cd It will start the computer in linux and will attempt to update itself via ethernet (so plug the laptop in to the internet wire) That's a good place to start from (and, in any event, you should do your damndest to clean up the computer before you nuke it or you might transfer crap -ware along with the stuff that you are attempting to save from her current installation). |
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Buy a disk of the operating system that you would like to install on this PC. (Ensure that the system hardware can handle the OS).
If you actually reach this stage and want to re-load your PC to a like-new configuration (minus the unwanted crap) .... let me know. It's easy to do and your PC will run like never before. (I'll help you...and we'll succeed). |
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Go here and download rkill Save it to the desktop.
It disables non-windows processes running in memory. MSCONFIG won't necessarily get all of the rootkits that start at boot. The executable's name is iexplore.exe because a lot of viruses stop anti-virus programs, but they all want Internet Explorer to run. 
Then go here and download Malwarebytes. Run the install then update it if you can. Run the scan. It will take an hour, maybe more so go watch TV while the scan run. You'll probably have to reboot and let Malwarebytes finish things out. Then go here and download and install Microsoft Security Essentials if there isn't any anti-virus software that is enabled and up to date on the computer. Spybot S&D is good to have, but you have to manually update and run it periodically. It has a good immunize feature though. You can get it here. Malwarebytes should be run periodically as well. |
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the daughter shows up at our house with her Toshiba Satellite L505 laptop. As with any 22 year old girl who pretty much lives for the day not thinking too much about tomorrow and of course her one year old laptop is full of crap!!!!! I have never seen so much crap in my entire life on a laptop. You cannot move the mouse without stupid pop up crap coming on the screen. So many programs that her and her so called friends have added on but she has no idea what they do.
I am a Mac guy so PC's ain't my thing but being a Dad who tries to help out his daughter, I am looking for advice. My thinking is lets blow this thing up and start up all over from scratch. She does not have a recovery disk so I am thinking I need to make one? But I am clueless so is there someone out there who can give me some points on the best way to do this?? I am guessing she may have some documents and pics she wants to save and I can stick them on a flash drive until I get a clean slate going. Any help would be greatly appreciated
Nah it's easy really Programs -> Accessories -> system tools -> system restore. Restore to the earliest checkpoint. Any program installed after that point will not work, but all files will be intact. Much easier to clean up after you do that. |
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Quoted: Reformat and reinstall. Nuked with fire. This. To make things easy get a removable hard drive from Best Buy (or pretty much anywhere these days). Those things are dirt cheap. Transfer all files that she wants to keep. Then reformat the hard drive and do a complete reinstall. |
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Start > Run > 'appwiz.cpl'
Uninstall ANYTHING that looks hinkey and anything you KNOW she doesn't need. Restart Then do Start > Run > msconfig. Go to the Startup tab. Uncheck everything you KNOW you don't want running. Experiment with the rest. If her puter is still slow, I'd recommend getting an external drive to save all of her stuff to, and then use the recovery media that came with the laptop to fdisk-format-reinstall... doo dah, doo dah. |
