NovemberTwenty Two

Virus, Adware, Desktop Hijacker

My brother in Michigan sent me his laptop because he could no longer access the internet, and his desktop has a splash screen overlaying the background saying: DANGER, you're infected by a virus! You must take action immediately!"

Needless to say he didn't know what to do with it, so he asked me to fix that for him. I started using the standard tools to disable most of the start-ups, but that didn't do the job. I tried everything to make an internet connection so I can download anti-spyware and virus tools, but it doesn't allow me to connect to the internet. Loading SpyBot S&D and AdAwareSE downloaded to another computer then install via a CD doesn't allow me to clean it up because, guess what, these tools need to download their latest detection rule files and without a connection to the internet, that's not going to happen.

So I backed up all his personal files, pictures, and documents that he had on to a DVD. Luckily for this laptop, Dell had partition the hard drive into two section, the second one being a PC Restore partition. That allows me to restore the computer to the state that it came in with when we first bought it. I then went into a Safe Mode boot, format the primary disk partition, and restore the laptop to its new factory configuration, and sure enough, all the virus and other malware are now gone.

I copied back all his files into the newly created disk, and I was then able to get on the internet. For future safeguard, I then downloaded AdAwareSE, SpyBot S&D and a few other utilities that I know he would use. These are: CDeX (a CD ripper that can rip into wav file or mp3), 1by1 MP3 Player, FastStone Image Viewer, VLC Video Player (one of the best video player that can play almost every type of video format), and CDBurner XP (a CD/DVD burner). These are all freeware.

Did you know that Microsoft Vista, in their stupidest wisdom, provided Windows Media Player with Vista, but when you insert a CD or DVD movie, it will not be able to play it. It would barf and say that I need to download some codec or something like it. How can a giant like Microsoft charge a few hundred bucks for the operating system and provide tools that cannot play a common, run of the mill commercial audio CD or video DVD right away? Aargh.