Damn The Computarted

Overheal

I just need to vent :pac: Im not yet at the point of confusion.

I mean here I am over at my cousin's place and I guess I'm considered the computer whiz; I dont mind, I get free room and board, they have the internet, a few boats and a canal out the back if im feeling adventurous, so I dont mind doing some charity work.

Anyway the first thing I have to do is troubleshoot their wireless; surprisingly took very little time. Then I offered to help my cousin pick parts for his new build, I went and made a couple tweaks to my aunt and uncle's machine, which fortunately appeared to have been recently wiped so there wasnt much work to do there.

But THIS machine. Holy ****ing ****.

I have no idea how old the machine is, but its got XP Home SP2, a 2GHz core and 256MB of Ram... but when you get to the desktop the first thing you see is the wallpaper of a giant red biohazard Icon screaming WARNING: YOUR COMPUTER MAY BE AT RISK. DOWNLOAD PRIVACY PROTECTION SOFTWARE NOW.



Msconfig pops up, telling you about selective startup, grand. First job: get Spybot. Fighting my way to the download page before getting outted by some very Vista-esque official looking popups for spyware (one was very classy, it looked like a proper win32 install wizard) I get the tea timer running; so for the last hour half the screen has been rendered useless because of the popup notifications of some piece of **** trying to make registry changes.

So then when I got curious as to how many processes were running; turns out the Task Manager has been locked by some virus. "The Task Manager Has Been Blocked By Your Administrator" when you are in fact, the administrator.

And desktop icons, lets see: "Error Cleaner", "Privacy Protector", "Spyware & Malware Protection", "AIM"(Shudder), and what the hell is FrostWire? Bah! Ironically the only thing the machine isnt infected with is the Yahoo Toolbar.

And hoping to have the Spybot Scan done by the time I finished posting this; its still running, the tea timer is still a blockin' and Oh there goes that classy looking installer again.

So, whats your horror story? What do you have to put up with? Whos the Computarded sonnofabitch in Your Family?

ActorSeeksJob

Thats a walk in the park for some of the infections I've removed

Spybot won't remove it, I suggest you follow the Sticky Thread steps

Dartz

My younger brother is an idiot. Any file that downloads from the wbe, he has to run it. Despite me beating him about the head... Every six weeks or so, I get the same request. "Can you fix the computer please? I have a virus..."

Just one?

This is Windows XP SP2
This machine has 2Gb of RAM
This has a decent Dual core processor.
This machine takes ten minutes to boot up and shut down.

He has:
Frostwire
Limewire
Random Internet games
Random MSN smilies
****loads of little applets

If he gets a link in MSN, he'll click it.
If he gets a file download, he'll run it.

So, right now, I've formed a remote desktop connection with his machine... while he was using it... I uninstalled half the trash he'd installed on the poor thing, until he finally got the idea to unplug it...

Then bitch to me to recover the PC, and all the crap I'd erased.

Grand so, I'll reformat the harddrive and reinstall the OS. Wipe the whole thing and go back to bare... Where's the system disk...

"Um, I lost it..."

****.

And, quite frankly, I'm too lazy to do all that stuff in the thread. It's not my PC, why should I care. I installed Linux on it for when I need to use it, so that's not a problem. I just run a lazy Avast! virus scan, and give it a once-through with spybot, nuke what they show up, and call it clean.

I know it isn't... it obviously isn't... but I'm not going to clean it up completely, only for it to get loaded again.

Overheal

Aye I hear you. Its so much less painful to wipe the machine and re-install windows. I've followed stickies before sure but they end up taking me more time than backing up my files and just reformatting overnight. Just use the Magic Jelly Bean App to recover the machine's Product Key from the registry, and download a copy of the install CD off the interweb and burn it to disc. Trying to find a CD for this comp I stumbled across in XP all-in-one disc that has all versions of XP on it (Home, Pro, Media, OEM, Retail etc) on one handy disc.

Dartz if it were me I'd live the little bastard to wallow in his own filth.

Dartz

Well...

I wasn't going to clean it, until I noticed it was sending out massive bursts of data....Literally clogging the web connection for five minutes... then going quiet. (Storm?) Annoying when your PS3 is in the middle of a firmware update.... and gets cut off because of it.

Also, when you start getting alerts from McAfee that something is attacking your firewall from its IP, it's time to kill it.

So... I open up Spybot, just checking startup entries. 2 possible worms, 4 definite worms, a bunch of 'suspicious things',... Thing gives errors searching for Trojans.

I delete the registry keys... generally finagle around... but arse... it ain't going. And I don't want to bother decent people like Actorseeksjob with this piece of crap. Especially when it'll just get infected again. I'm too lazy meself too.

Frack that... buy Vista + Kaspersky. Install. Put strict account controls on. 250 quid for reasonable peace of Mind. And a better Anti-virus for my Laptop than McAfee aswell.

Macker1

Overheal wrote: »

Aye I hear you. Its so much less painful to wipe the machine and re-install windows. I've followed stickies before sure but they end up taking me more time than backing up my files and just reformatting overnight. Just use the Magic Jelly Bean App to recover the machine's Product Key from the registry, and download a copy of the install CD off the interweb and burn it to disc. Trying to find a CD for this comp I stumbled across in XP all-in-one disc that has all versions of XP on it (Home, Pro, Media, OEM, Retail etc) on one handy disc.

Dartz if it were me I'd live the little bastard to wallow in his own filth.

Do you have a link or details to the all-in-one disc for the XP versions.

Thanks

Mark

aidan_walsh

I don't want to see, smell or even suspect any warezing going on here.

Terry

Overheal wrote: »

I just need to vent :pac: Im not yet at the point of confusion.

I mean here I am over at my cousin's place and I guess I'm considered the computer whiz; I dont mind, I get free room and board, they have the internet, a few boats and a canal out the back if im feeling adventurous, so I dont mind doing some charity work.

Anyway the first thing I have to do is troubleshoot their wireless; surprisingly took very little time. Then I offered to help my cousin pick parts for his new build, I went and made a couple tweaks to my aunt and uncle's machine, which fortunately appeared to have been recently wiped so there wasnt much work to do there.

But THIS machine. Holy ****ing ****.

I have no idea how old the machine is, but its got XP Home SP2, a 2GHz core and 256MB of Ram... but when you get to the desktop the first thing you see is the wallpaper of a giant red biohazard Icon screaming WARNING: YOUR COMPUTER MAY BE AT RISK. DOWNLOAD PRIVACY PROTECTION SOFTWARE NOW.



Msconfig pops up, telling you about selective startup, grand. First job: get Spybot. Fighting my way to the download page before getting outted by some very Vista-esque official looking popups for spyware (one was very classy, it looked like a proper win32 install wizard) I get the tea timer running; so for the last hour half the screen has been rendered useless because of the popup notifications of some piece of **** trying to make registry changes.

So then when I got curious as to how many processes were running; turns out the Task Manager has been locked by some virus. "The Task Manager Has Been Blocked By Your Administrator" when you are in fact, the administrator.

And desktop icons, lets see: "Error Cleaner", "Privacy Protector", "Spyware & Malware Protection", "AIM"(Shudder), and what the hell is FrostWire? Bah! Ironically the only thing the machine isnt infected with is the Yahoo Toolbar.

And hoping to have the Spybot Scan done by the time I finished posting this; its still running, the tea timer is still a blockin' and Oh there goes that classy looking installer again.

So, whats your horror story? What do you have to put up with? Whos the Computarded sonnofabitch in Your Family?

I could have written that myself, minus the canal and free lodging bits.

I'm far from an expert, but I do know a bit and in the five or so years I've been with Eircom, I've never had a virus (IBB was a different story, but I didn't know as much back then).

I've been removing viruses, spy and malware since Friday on five different computers (with help from the good folk here) and four of the five people use Eircom.

One of the viruses installed an icon in the control panel under the name "Windows security center" and had the same logo as the proper "security center".
It was a virus using a programme named "Antivirus 2009" and did look quite official.
Took me a good while to get rid of it and it was on three of the affected computers.

I'm gonna have to start charging for this crap.

On one of the computers, I left a note which basically said that if there were any more problems, I would be charging €50 and that I looked forward to taking their money because I knew that none of them would read my instructions.

BoB_BoT

Dartz, next time you have to recover your brothers pc, wipe it clean, get it back to normal, fully setup with av and all. then ghost it to a dvd. warn the brother if he keeps installing things left right and center that are dodgy, you'll just ghost it every time not bothering trying to repair it. he'll lose all his files, but maybe he'll learn :P Also the databurst could mean the pc was a zombie, sending out spam.

Overheal, sounds alot like the pcs I get in work. Limewire, frostwire, bearshare, kazaa, etc.. all the dodgy download apps, all riddled with adware, spyware, malware etc... I'd say 3 out of 5 pcs I get in with software problems, don't have an anti-virus or working antivirus (norton/macafee 30day preinstall with os). A lot of people I know think that by just having an anti-virus they're safe, yet a lot of them have spyware, after installing the likes of the programs mentioned above, the complain their internet, pc, toaster etc.. are running slow for no reason.

The only way I look at it is, if they don't learn, it's recurring business