Posted: 5/30/2013 4:44:53 PM EDT
I'm a moron. 
My mom asked me to fix their computer, and I know just slightly more than shit about Jack on that... Her complaints were that it is running slow, and weird pages open up when she is using the internet. In digging around I found that their firewall was down...well trashed I guess. I couldn't get it up at all. I went through and deleted a lot of programs that I don't know of/know they aren't going to need(DealPlus and Pricegong were two). I downloaded and ran MSE and that pulled 16 trojans and a few add-ons(I think that is what it called them) off, but it is still running at a bash your face in with frustration speed and when I open the browser it goes to mixi.dj even though the home page is set for yahoo.com..? I am now stuck on what to do next. Halp, please. 
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Quoted:
I'm a moron.
My mom asked me to fix their computer, and I know just slightly more than shit about Jack on that... Her complaints were that it is running slow, and weird pages open up when she is using the internet. In digging around I found that their firewall was down...well trashed I guess. I couldn't get it up at all. I went through and deleted a lot of programs that I don't know of/know they aren't going to need(DealPlus and Pricegong were two). I downloaded and ran MSE and that pulled 16 trojans and a few add-ons(I think that is what it called them) off, but it is still running at a bash your face in with frustration speed and when I open the browser it goes to mixi.dj even though the home page is set for yahoo.com..? I am now stuck on what to do next. Halp, please. You could try to fix it, but at this point a clean install is the best option. How to clean up the computer as it is: So you ran MSE and got rid of the obvious malware. Now you need to uninstall any junk programs/toolbars/ect. and make sure only the essential stuff starts up at boot. You can do this through the control panel (add/remove programs) and msconfig (for the startup). I would advise you to post screenshots of the installed programs list and msconfig startup list so we can advise you on what to uninstall/disable and what is good. Control panel screenshot example: 
Install programs screenshot example: 
MS config startup screenshot example: 
But you would really be better off with a clean install and setting up safeguards to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. |
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Ditto, Malwarebytes and CC cleaner will get most of it cleaned up, but god only knows if the OS files have been corrupted or not.
Get a USB hardrive and back up her data to it, then nuke the hard drive from orbit with a reformat, and start with a fresh OS install so you know that the OS is not corrupted to begin with. From there, once you have everything reloaded, then you can use CC cleaner to go into the start up menu to stop apps from loading at start up that are not needed to speed up the machine (same as just using msconfig). And truth is, about once a year, may as well just redo a fresh OS install on a computer since in a year, a lot of Needed OS files can be corrupted or deleted from just normal use of the machine with bad downloads. As for a firewall and antivirus program, the MS ones will be fine, since the problem will not be normal running ones, but the bad apps that she will be downloading and allowing to run the problem instead. |
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for parents and inlaws, after I run a clean install, I usually back up that version with ghost or some similar software so I have a copy on a seperate partition.
once a year or so someone calls and complains they got problems like yours, or they can see they got a virus from so and so(can't get them to understand, not to open all the emails from people ) and that lets me blow away the OS with an image. takes a day job and turns it into an hour or 2. oh and in the registry change the default temp to the second partition so anything they save goes there. |
