So I spent a long time last night trying to fix my friends PC. Her Windows would not boot. It would come up with an error saying Windows had stopped booting to protect her drive from damage. I brought my PC to her place, threw in her drive as a slave and Windows repaired a bunch of errors on the drive. If I was smart, at that point, I would have done a virus scan and adware/malware removal from my PC. We backed up a bunch of her stuff and burnt it to DVDs.
So now I get to the annoying part. I put her drive back in her PC, expecting her Windows to be fucked and not boot. Turns out it works, which is good, but there was so much crazy malware/adware on her PC that I couldn't really get it working. There was some "virus scanner" that had installed itself on her PC. It was in the tray and you couldn't shut it off, or remove it from add/remove, or uninstall it. When it ran it would find things and then direct you to a website to buy a retail version to actually remove the virus. I managed to figure out which process it was, kill it, and then deleted the files which were installed in a directory named with garbage characters, and then I wiped it out of the registry manually.
I finally managed to get enough crap off and have things running well enough (after figuring out she had Spybot, OneCare and some Norton package all running at the same time, doing the same thing) to get a good virus scanner installed. I left at 1:30am with the virus scan at 50%.
I'd love to blast it and reinstall XP, but she couldn't find her disc and key. Any suggestions on a great way to remove malware? She still is getting weird popups to her desktop and something is interfering with her web browser by redirecting to security software for sale.
It was a nightmare, to say the least.
So now I get to the annoying part. I put her drive back in her PC, expecting her Windows to be fucked and not boot. Turns out it works, which is good, but there was so much crazy malware/adware on her PC that I couldn't really get it working. There was some "virus scanner" that had installed itself on her PC. It was in the tray and you couldn't shut it off, or remove it from add/remove, or uninstall it. When it ran it would find things and then direct you to a website to buy a retail version to actually remove the virus. I managed to figure out which process it was, kill it, and then deleted the files which were installed in a directory named with garbage characters, and then I wiped it out of the registry manually.
I finally managed to get enough crap off and have things running well enough (after figuring out she had Spybot, OneCare and some Norton package all running at the same time, doing the same thing) to get a good virus scanner installed. I left at 1:30am with the virus scan at 50%.
I'd love to blast it and reinstall XP, but she couldn't find her disc and key. Any suggestions on a great way to remove malware? She still is getting weird popups to her desktop and something is interfering with her web browser by redirecting to security software for sale.
It was a nightmare, to say the least.