Help, my PC has been hijacked by Windows 2007!

abff

My PC has been acting up recently and I twice had to do a hard shut down when it froze on me. When it eventually came back on, it invited me to install IE11, which I did (big mistake?).

After it loaded, I found that my start menu had disappeared and my (paid for) version of Office 2003 has disappeared and been replaced by a 60 day trial version of Office 2007. I'm reluctant to go any further with installing Office 2007 until I know the implications of doing this.

I would welcome any advice or suggestions as to what I should do next.

PS: sorry if this is the wrong forum. I wasn't sure where to post it.

Mr. G

The only thing you could do is uninstall the Office 2007 software and reinstall the Office 2003 software. You will need the product key when installing Office 2003 however.

abff

Thanks. I guess I could try that (assuming I can find the product key) but can anyone explain how Windows 2007 suddenly appeared uninvited on my PC and how do I stop it from happening again?

Mr. G

Did you run a Windows Update? If its a Windows Vista/7/8, try searching "Word" and see if you find "Word 2003" there in the search results.

IE11 doesn't come with Office 2007. It is a new update for IE, and 2013 is the latest Office update.

abff

I genuinely have no idea what I did to cause this to happen. I was defragging the hard drive yesterday when my daughter went online to check some bad news she had just heard. Since then, it has been running very slowly, even in excel, and has frozen several times. Today, I did a hard shutdown twice in a row because my PC kept freezing.

After the second time, I left it alone for about 5 minutes and when I came back it was inviting me to install IE11. I clicked on yes and everything happened after that. Apart from anything else, the font size onscreen has become much smaller.

I don't suppose there's any chance I'll get a free upgrade from Office 2003 to Office 2007? I'm afraid to use my PC right now and this is being posted on my iPad.

Paruparo

You could try and do a system restore to rollback to a restore point where you know the system was functioning fine with Office 2003.

With regards to your genuine software key, you could try Belarc Advisor. I have used this before. You run it and it will interrogate your system and software and present all the data in a webpage format, but the beauty of it, is, it shows you the product keys that you genuinely entered for your software. Worth a try:

http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

the_syco

Run the Magic Jellybean, and it'll give ye the serial number you entered.

abff

Thanks for the advice. I'll use those links to find my product key and I'll do a system restore. How do I actually go about doing a system restore? And after I've done this, should I re-install IE11 or should I just stay with what I had previously.

Also, any idea what I might have done to cause Office 2007 to load and how I might avoid making a similar mistake in the future?

Of course, the other option is to accept the upgrade. Any idea how much this will cost me when the 60 day trial period is over? And (silly question this) will I have any problem accessing my old emails if I upgrade from Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007?

Apologies for all the questions, but I have something of a blind spot when it comes to figuring out how operating systems work.

5uspect

Office 2007 has a new user interface that you may not like or find hard to use. In my opinion it's an abomination.

I'm not aware of MS pushing out Office 2007 over windows update and IE11 is just a web browser.

The first thing to check is if your 2003 Office products are still there. You say your Start menu has disappeared. Can you elaborate on this? What kind of computer is it? Is it a Dell or HP or something? Do you know if runsWindiws XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8. It should say on the black screen when you start it.

Windows 8 has removed the Start menu, you haven't been upgraded to Windows 8 by any chance have you?

the_syco

Press the "Windows" button and the "R" button at the same time. In the box that appears, type winver and click okay. This will tell you what version of Windows you have.

abff

the_syco wrote: »

Press the "Windows" button and the "R" button at the same time. In the box that appears, type winver and click okay. This will tell you what version of Windows you have.

I did that and when I clicked OK it took around 2 minutes before a box eventually appeared telling me that I have Windows 7 Professional, Version 6.1 (Build 7601: Service Pack 1). I don't think that was the version until the recent "highjacking", but I can't be sure.

The PC is an ACER Veriton that I bought in May 2010.

5uspect

Windows 7 came out in 2009, with the first service pack in mid 2010 so that's likely what it came with.
Now that we know what OS you're running if you press the windows button again and click programs in the menu that appears and look in the list for Microsoft Office do you see entries for 2003 and 2007 or just 2007?

abff

Turned on my PC 5 minutes ago and I'm still waiting for it to load.:mad: The welcome button is churning away in the middle of the screen.

It finally came on after about 8 minutes. When I go into All Programs/Microsoft Office, only office 2007 appears. As I think I mentioned previously, Google Chrome has also disappeared.

Is it possible that some has remotely hacked into my PC and is controlling it? Or is that just one of those urban legends that confuses those of us who struggle with how this sort of thing operates?

5uspect

abff wrote: »

Turned on my PC 5 minutes ago and I'm still waiting for it to load.:mad: The welcome button is churning away in the middle of the screen.

It finally came on after about 8 minutes. When I go into All Programs/Microsoft Office, only office 2007 appears. As I think I mentioned previously, Google Chrome has also disappeared.

Is it possible that some has remotely hacked into my PC and is controlling it? Or is that just one of those urban legends that confuses those of us who struggle with how this sort of thing operates?

Its very very unlikely that anyone would remotely access your machine and install MS Office. Usually botnets are running some custom scripts to attack webpages not to do a few spreadsheets.

However something is slowing your machine down. Are you familiar with the task manager and how to use it to find processes using a lot of computer resources?
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/see-details-computers-performance-task-manager#1TC=windows-7

I guess the next think to try is a system restore.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-IE/windows7/products/features/system-restore

Go back to a date before the problems first occurred. You may need to reinstall Office 2003, so see if those tools listed earlier help.

abff

Thanks. I guess I'll have to try a system restore. I ran the magic jelly bean, but then only product keys it gave me were for Windows 7 Professional, Microsoft Ultimate 2007 and Nero 9. I know it was Office 2003 that I was running up to now, so I'm totally bewildered about how this happened.

Maybe I should contact the store where I bought the PC and ask them if they can help?

5uspect

abff wrote: »

Thanks. I guess I'll have to try a system restore. I ran the magic jelly bean, but then only product keys it gave me were for Windows 7 Professional, Microsoft Ultimate 2007 and Nero 9. I know it was Office 2003 that I was running up to now, so I'm totally bewildered about how this happened.

Maybe I should contact the store where I bought the PC and ask them if they can help?

Can't imagine they will help with this TBH. Usually the PC Worlds of this world just tell you to format your machine.
Might be better off with a dedicated repair specialist or at least someone you know with more technical knowledge.

beauf

abff wrote: »

.... I know it was Office 2003 that I was running up to now, so I'm totally bewildered about how this happened....

Is this a different PC to the on mentioned here, because you reckon you had Office 2007 back then.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=83961054&postcount=1

abff

beauf wrote: »

Is this a different PC to the on mentioned here, because you reckon you had Office 2007 back then.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=83961054&postcount=1

Good point beauf. It is the same PC. It looks as if I had Windows 7 all along, but I'm 99% certain that it was MS Office 2003, although now I'm beginning to doubt myself. I'll see if I can find the discs tomorrow. The PC is definitely operating differently and is inviting me to instal new software (for example, Outlook 2007) and Google Chrome has disappeared without any explanation. Maybe I just reset everything to default settings without realising it? But why is it referring to the software as a 60 day trial?

That is quite worrying. I don't THINK I'm going senile, but then again, I guess I'd be the last to know.

abff

5uspect wrote: »

Can't imagine they will help with this TBH. Usually the PC Worlds of this world just tell you to format your machine.
Might be better off with a dedicated repair specialist or at least someone you know with more technical knowledge.

The place I bought the PC was a specialist shop in Camden street that also does repairs, so I expect they would be more open to trying to help me than the large retail chains. I might phone them on Monday to talk it through with them.

Anyway, after seeing beauf's post, I'm starting to think I might just be going bananas.

5uspect

So there is no such thing as Windows 2007, Windows is an Operating System. This is what makes all the parts of your computer work together.
Office is a productivity suite. So your iPad's OS is called iOS and you can install productivity apps like Pages or Numbers on it. Similarity you can build a PC, install Windows 7 or Windows 8 or even Linux on it and then install Microsoft's Office productivity Suite or the free LibreOffice to perform particular tasks.

You seem to be very confused about this - maybe it's time to figure out what your actually using as well as getting some help to fix your problem.

beauf

abff wrote: »

My PC has been acting up recently and I twice had to do a hard shut down when it froze on me. When it eventually came back on, it invited me to install IE11, which I did (big mistake?).

After it loaded, I found that my start menu had disappeared and ....

I wonder did your PC crash, and then in restarting it did a repair, which reset to an earlier configuration.

If you bought it from a shop you probably have a receipt which shows what you actually bought. There maybe details of any Office that was included.

abff

5uspect, beauf

Thank you both for your posts. I replied to both yesterday, but my replies seem to have disappeared as part of boards being down yesterday.

Anyway, I now have my PC back up and running, but still really, really slow. I'm going to try defragmenting both drives to see if this helps. I've tried running task manager and it just shows that about 97% is system idle processes.

I have my Outlook back on line and managed (with some initial difficulty) to find my pst back up file and restore it. I found my Office disks and they are indeed Office 2007. I don't know how I got the idea fixed in my mind that I was on Office 2003, I can only ascribe it to a senior moment.

I think it's clear that the PC must have crashed and restarting it caused a repair. It's also clear to me that I need to get a better understanding of operating systems and I would be very grateful for any suggestions as to any courses that might be available that would help in this regard.

Thanks again for your responses and for not castigating me for being a complete idiot.

beauf

Don't know about courses. I learnt by breaking things, making mistakes then fixing them. Which is what you've done here.

Once you have a backup, braking things isn't usually an issue. Though its handy to have a 2nd machine so you always have one working.

Look through the links here. Mainly about coding but theres bound to be some hardware/os courses mentioned.
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=88274644#post88274644

Otherwise just read forums, tech news sites and magazines.
I like http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/index.php

5uspect

Same here, mostly self taught, with plenty of reading of tech sites like Ars Technica and Anandtech.

With regards to the Task Manager it seems that the CPU isn't under stress, the next thing to check is if your RAM is being used up.
If the OS or a program is eating up all available memory the system has to use your hard disk, which is slower, and so the system can grind to a standstill.
So you need to figure out how much RAM you have and what is using it and how much is free. The link I posted before should help with this but the easiest way is to go to the processes tab and sort by memory usage. Perhaps post a print screen of the result here.
Here is how to do a print screen.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ie/windows/take-screen-capture-print-screen#take-screen-capture-print-screen=windows-8

Also Windows 7 should defrag your drives automatically as a scheduled task, it's not going to make a huge difference regardless.