Spybot s&d warning!

[Headbanger]

If its just a single system file you can just copy it into the required place by hooking the HD into another pc, takes about 4 minutes and 20 seconds.

Provided your research has identified which file or files that keylogger corrupts on installation and removal.

[mister.koz]

If its just a single system file you can just copy it into the required place by hooking the HD into another pc, takes about 4 minutes and 20 seconds.

Provided your research has identified which file or files that keylogger corrupts on installation and removal.

Or you could do a recovery install from the windows setup disk.

Connecting the hard drive to an external caddy is only helpful if you know what you are doing, otherwise its just confusing.

[Headbanger]

Or or or, There are multiple ways of approaching the issue, Personally I consider installing over the top of an existing install to be a garbage method.

And it takes the same amount of time to bung a hard drive onto an IDE cable as it does to install it into a caddy, so I personally wouldn't bother with a caddy.

Either way, Its pretty obvious the thread starter has scant idea what they are doing, Though I personally don't see that as good reason to recommend the worst solution.

Actually, If I were to be perfectly honest I'd suggest they refrain from working on their PC and get someone in who can. There is a lot to be said for stopping before it gets worse. Though if they paid someone whose capabilities consisted of inserting the XP cd then that perhaps isn't a great idea either.

[GIXser]

Mate .. just get ya floppy, insert it in the cpu. then run defrag... reboot, upgrade the ram,...run boot,exe. check all the USB's and make sure the monitor is turned off at this stage.. and voila... easy peasy

[scracha]

The problem is that ya can't get back into windows at all, not in safe mode either.....we're working on it, there's a few cures out there, I just wanna have a go at fixing it myself......then I'll ask for some help after I stuff it up

Good for you for fixing it yourself.

Well I earn a living doing this (and that!) and sure, there's always uber-geeks who's ask you to send in hijackthis logs and fanny about unregistering dll's etc etc...BUT..... These days, when you're charging peeps by the hour then after a quick scan, check of registry, fixmbr... whatever and check for obvious fuckups (around 20 mins) I'm quicker doing a backup and then recovery install. Regardless of the nasty trojans and rootkits around, most peeps windows installs are often completely borked after a few years with all the $hit they've installed so I'd say I'm doing this around 50% of the time.

If you can't be arsed moving hard drives around then a UBCD4Win disk is an absolute godsend. All the antivirus in the world doesn't stop windows shitting itself from time to time (although my main pc has been ok for the past 6 years) and probably the best idea for most peeps is to use dixml to take a complete system snapshot, preferably to an external drive but even doing it to the same drive is better than nothing. Dixml is free and you can even keep using the PC whilst it's doing the backup.

Vista....$hit I must be the only guy out there who likes it. I rarely get vista machines back in with problems (and I've been selling PC's with it since it came out) compared to XP. Most of the problems are from peeps running it on $hit hardware (1GB ram, celeron), pre service pack 1 or they've turned off user account control.

[scracha]

Mate, try starting in Safe mode and do a system restore to before it got buggered up.

As I've said before....nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Don't use system restore these days. There's more of a chance of it fucking things up worse than fixing it.

[DEATH_INC.]

Back up and running...did have to get a mate to help though. The instructions off the web weren't quite right....
Part of the problem is when I upgraded spybot it didn't.....it was still 1.3, tried it a couple of times, had to remove 1.3 and re-install 1.6 to get it to work.

[SARGE]

Um....no....who does?????

I take an image of my laptop and my desktop once a month on outboard hard drives..250 gb drives are cheap enough now ya really cant afford not to.

also .. real easy little script to use for manual restore points..

open notepad

Set IRP = getobject("winmgmts:\\.\root\default:Systemrestore")

MYRP = IRP.createrestorepoint ("My Restore Point", 0, 100)

save as RESTORE POINT .vbs


right click on it and OPEN IN COMMAND PROMPT



done..

do that manually once a week or before installing or changing anything

[Forest]

I would advise not to use "Windows Advanceed System Care" primarily as programs with silly names are normally not good. Its not an exact science but i have been working with this type of computing for some time.

I use:

• Mcafe Stinger
• Spybot s&d
• Adaware se
• Malwarebytes Anti-malware
• Symantec antivirus corporate edition

And apart from irish viruses i have no troubles at all, but then i also use fire fox and never Internet explorer, I use a linux firewall (gentoo/iptables) and i don't click on porn banners or allow websites to install anything.

(ps. irish virus means you break shit yourself)

Or you could just buy a Mac.

The Mac platform has no known viruses or self-replicating trojans.

[mowgli]

Or you could just buy a Mac.

The Mac platform has no known viruses or self-replicating trojans.

The ratio of viruses to useful software on a Mac is about the same as on Windoze

[The Stranger:Me]

Mate .. just get ya floppy, insert it in the cpu. then run defrag... reboot, upgrade the ram,...run boot,exe. check all the USB's and make sure the monitor is turned off at this stage.. and voila... easy peasy

Best advice so far in this thread!

[Katman]

No need for that crap, what are you 2 years old or something?

Hey, no need for that.

Please think of the 2 year olds.

[cs363]

Vista....$hit I must be the only guy out there who likes it. I rarely get vista machines back in with problems (and I've been selling PC's with it since it came out) compared to XP. Most of the problems are from peeps running it on $hit hardware (1GB ram, celeron), pre service pack 1 or they've turned off user account control.

.... Not quite! I've had Vista (x64) on my new PC which I got towards the end of last year and I really can't understand what all the fuss is about. I've found it to be very stable and apart from a few issues with finding drivers etc right at the beginning (a few manufacturers were slow to come up with Vista compatible drivers) I've had no problems at all and I haven't turned any of the fancy features off. Runs all my games and other applications with no problems at all, even MS Flight Simulator on real high display settings with no hassles.
But I think you are spot on with the comment about running Vista on shit hardware as that has been my experience with any one that does have problems with it.

As far as back ups, I just took an image of the hard drive once I had everything set up with all the updates etc using Norton Ghost and I just keep that on a spare hard drive, if anything does happen it's simply a matter of swapping in the new drive and I'm up and running again.

[Winston001]

But isn't the objection to Vista is that it is such a resource hog? It gets sold with pcs having only 1GB of RAM and is slow as a wet week. Also Vista is security paranoid and has heaps of popups which kinda startle the average user.

All very well for those of us with the interest and enthusiasm to learn about computers but most folk simply don't. In fact the major let-down of the computer age is that computers appear to be unreliable, endlessly complicated, and completely unpredictable.

Ok, thats not my personal view but it certainly is what most people I talk to think. They view the computer as a tool: a fancy type-writer-sort-of TV so why does the thing slow down, fail to run programs, have fatal errors etc etc.......

[Winston001]

Just to expand on the above, the complexity of computers and computing systems is what allowed Michael Swan to steal $17 million from the Otago Health Board. He was the IT manager and every time someone questioned the huge bills, he explained they were for software licensing and systems backups. Non-computing people didn't understand that and just shrugged. Even auditing found nothing wrong.