Been at it for 2 days now. It was totaly screwed! A million pop ups. Processor spiked at 100% Ad aware found 1237 items! That's a record for me. Never saw that many. The female operator had no passwords, no virus protection, had auto update off, & never had any patches done. But has XP Pro loaded Now it won't let me install anything else. Get errors about the windows installer. It's just so bad. This might be the worst PC I ever had to deal with so far. I feel like smashing it into a million pieces. Might have to do a format & reinstall the thing. She's like I want my stuff saved. I might tell her it's all infected with viruses just so I can shut her up. It's not like I'm getting any for this

 

I would copy any data she wanted onto either disk or another pc, and reformat the whole thing. Cleaning up messy pc's is a pain in the ass.

 

i cought more unknow items using adaware onetime. u just have to scan it in safe mode, restart, scan again, restart, scan again, clean the registry, scan again, disk clean up, defrag...wait a day or so, scan again.

 

or do a search for all the files extension she want...zip it...and do an anti-virus scan on that zip file before copying into a disk or ur computer. then format ur whole computer.

 

I finally bought an external USB hard drive this past summer, which makes it so easy to just copy files I want from the computer to the portable hard drive, restart the computer from scratch...using the quick restore CDs if you got them. then loading the shit back on.

granted this isn't something I want to be doing more than once a year. it is the easiest way.

 

Happend to me once.

What I did, copied everything (except windows folder) onto a network drive which was immediatley scanned for viruses.

Formatted and Reinstalled Windows into the laptop. Patched.Installed Office. Patched. Installed Antivirus and then copied back all her data.

Sounds obvious; but time consuming tho.

$100 for the service cash

 

Once at my moms house, she had win 2000 all messed up.
I took care of all adware, cleaning startup in the registry and after that I reinstalled SP4 and also after that I reinstalled IE6.

It worked wonders.

 

I did the same thing for someone.

Took the Harddrive out of the machine. Put it in an external case Plugged that into another machine and had them copy off any data that they wanted to keep.


Then formated the drive right there then stuck it back in the machine and reinstalled the OS. Was easier and quicker than trying to clean up the machine. (and the data that they wanted to keep was infected with viruses all so. So they ended up loosing most of that data as well.)

 

it probably is infected w/ viruses

 

Salvage whatever you can and then set the hard drive on fire.. or at least format it

 

I've never had a PC that's so screwed up I couldn't fix it without reformatting. Granted, sometimes that's the faster way to go. Generally once I run Symantec AV corp edition, spybot search & destroy and adaware a few times all the problems are gone.

 

Untill you find that a portions of DLLs are already infested by viruses.

Depends on the time you have to solve the issue.

 

sounds like you have tvmedia... hhaha