Fun with puters part three
Wear protection.....
Saturday, May 21, 2005 by Jafo | Discussion: Personal Computing
A friend complained her XP machine was 'acting up' and brave old me said 'no sweat...I'm a consumate genius and modestly can fix it in a jiffy'.
She brung it over me joint and I rolled up the proverbials and got stuck into it.
Bit of a mess was putting it mildly....it hadn't a firewall or AV running for 'some time'.
I found a dozen or two 'issues' with it ...before pulling out the drive and chucking it in a caddy to load into my own machine...to do a thorough clean....
Norton got about 39 .... Pest patrol a further 26 then Ad Aware got the last...another 20 or so.....about 75 in all, ranging from key-loggers, 4 virii, trojan loaders and trackers...usual crap.
Then it was a simple case of copying all the 'data' to backup, full format, repartition and dump the data back on the 'D'.
All well and good.
Put the drive back into her machine...installed her XP and loaded a freeware ver of AVG.
Of course, that was out of date....needed new signature files, so I got on dial-up to update them....went to make a coffee.
Came back half an hour later....
ERROR on download.......
Something was wrong...so I did a drive scan with the 'old' AVG, and Ad Aware.....
303 hits
Oops, thinks I....perhaps it'd be wise to load that Zone Alarm first, before hooking to the net.
ZA pops up....."Ist.exe" wants access...."bugger off", I say.
A rush of frantic denials and several sweeps of the system later and I'm back to squeaky clean again.
Still....she's happy, now....
Moral of the story....get yer protection BEFORE hooking to the pox-ridden net...
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Reply #2 Sunday, May 22, 2005 12:17 AM
Reply #3 Sunday, May 22, 2005 1:50 AM
It never ceases to amaze me just how many people still put themselves in harms way ~by not staying protected.
There's so many good "free" apps available to protect your valuable 'puter with nowadays, there should be no excuses as to why somone has no protection.
Perhaps in the case of your friend there's a good reason, but I know of quite a few folks who still surf the net without any form of protection.
Silly, really.
Reply #4 Sunday, May 22, 2005 2:11 AM
Oh...forgot to mention how the 'error' manifested itself....
Every minute or two there'd be a message 'Explorer has encounted a problem and needs to close'...then the message would go, along with the Explorer shell [desktop] which would simply reload itself and repeat the message.
The simplistic re-install of XP over the system was a waste of time....hence the reformat, etc....
Reply #5 Sunday, May 22, 2005 2:32 AM
...700 something hits.
Reply #6 Sunday, May 22, 2005 2:44 AM
Real Time Protection + deep scanning..
It seems to be a great program so far..
I use Ad-aware also..but rarily now..MS Anti Spy seems to do the trick..
Reply #7 Sunday, May 22, 2005 9:48 AM
Set-up IE prefs to dump cookies/history/temps every time the browser is closed.. In IE this works "Okay" it isnt great and not 100% like it is in Firefox..but it's better than not setting the prefs at all!
Of course I already mentioned MS-Antispy ..the "Real" time protection of the program is awesome..there is another free program that I use in IE that is also "Real-Time" protection..
GoGo Data Toolbar - http://gogodata.com/
It also has many other features, some of which are built into the Firefox browser as a standard, but IE lacks. I dont recommend putting it on a Win98 machine..
Last of all, a file and registry cleaner/repair that was actually posted here in a thread.. It cleans out so much more than what the other programs mentioned do. I actually no longer run "Disk Cleanup" This program, Ccleaner, pretty much wipes out ALL the junk you could ever want to wipe out... More than "Disk Cleanup" does..
You can get it here http://www.ccleaner.com/
Ontop of all that, the standard ZoneAlarm, Nortons, AVG, etc..etc...
LoL..Sad isnt it?? all these utilities just to be able to keep a healthy running machine connected to the internet...::SIGHS::
Ah well, These are just a few of the programs I use against all the junk out there we are bound to run into & collect, im sure there are a ton of other progs, since it is obviously a HUGE problem..
Just remember your protection!,
Dont log-on without it..LoL
Reply #8 Sunday, May 22, 2005 10:07 AM
Now I keep some essential programs on my USB flash drive. Ad-Aware, Spybot, Deamon Tools. I should put some freeware antivirus and firewall on it. Quite nice when someone I know need an emergency binary operation.
Reply #9 Monday, May 23, 2005 12:28 PM
Reply #10 Monday, May 23, 2005 12:33 PM
Reply #11 Monday, May 23, 2005 5:35 PM
Latest update...no sooner had I sorted my friend's machine than my Niece's one turns up on the doorstep... she's 14 and her IE is being hijacked to porn sites...and it's a particularly feisty infection....quite likely a full reformat again...
If I ever get my hands on one of the retards who thinks Hijackers are kewl I'll slit his nostrils...
....and feed his gonads to my cat....
Reply #13 Monday, May 23, 2005 6:55 PM
Reply #14 Monday, May 23, 2005 8:44 PM
Since they don't sell the cases, keyboards, and monitor's that are standard in compatibility - I bought a Dell (really nice). Decided before hand that I don't want all the prepackaged stuff, so -
Step #1 - Download all board and hardware drivers from Dell (all there!).
Step #2 - Do clean install Windows XP w/SP2 (including reformat NTFS - Raw).
Step #3 - Install all drivers.
Step #4 - Go to Windows Update and install all patches I want.
Step #5 - Install AV and Internet Security software (I like Symantec, so that's the one).
Step #6 - Install all software programs I use, including the all important customization stuff.
Step #7 - Run Ad-Aware and Spybot.
Step #8 - Done - all is well and I love this Notebook (first one ever!).
Simple, practical approach and common sense precautions = a wonderful future with computers.
Reply #15 Monday, May 23, 2005 9:55 PM
Reply #16 Monday, May 23, 2005 10:22 PM
I have indeed seen that SP2 can create some problems at work with older databases, so I agree that care must be used when deploying it in large networks with older hardware and obsolescent programs.
The Dell notebook I purchased is a 2005 model, so they built it after SP2 came out, and it runs the 915 chipset and a PCIe bus with compatible hardware which include drivers written for XP w/SP2. Symantec also managed to write a fix for NIS 2003 so it communicates with the XP firewall and allows peaceful coexistence.
All in all, I really like the Notebook, especially the fact that Dell made this thing easy to upgrade in all aspects of hardware.
Fabulous fun.
Reply #17 Monday, May 23, 2005 10:34 PM
In case your wondering - I have a Nvidia Nforce2 chipset.
Reply #18 Tuesday, May 24, 2005 5:49 AM
i have never gotten viruses or been hijacked, even through those 2-3 years i didnt have an internet security solution.
Reply #19 Tuesday, May 24, 2005 6:34 AM
| the biggest one being the whole systems seems to slow to a crawl. |
Should be easy enough to track down... what have you looked at to diagnose it?
I've got SP2 installed on 4 different machines (1 laptop 3 desktops including a 633MHz PIII, all XP Pro) with no problems at all.
Reply #20 Tuesday, May 24, 2005 6:42 AM
| Step #4 - Go to Windows Update and install all patches I want. Step #5 - Install AV and Internet Security software (I like Symantec, so that's the one). |
Do that the other way round. Don't even think about connecting without a firewall being installed
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Reply #1 Sunday, May 22, 2005 12:06 AM
Very wise advice...