laptop is dying.

gubby

yesterday (on advice from son in law) I downloaded "crome" and was prompted to download some repair thing. which cost me 30 euro. It took all night to go through all my stuff and to cut a long story short now when I turn on my laptop I get an error message. OXC0000139 and suggesting to restore. that does not work and then I am directed to go to C:/system32/logfiles/srt/srtTrail.txt as I cannot log into or start windows I cant do this. HELP

jungleman

gubby wrote: »

yesterday (on advice from son in law) I downloaded "crome" and was prompted to download some repair thing. which cost me 30 euro. It took all night to go through all my stuff and to cut a long story short now when I turn on my laptop I get an error message. OXC0000139 and suggesting to restore. that does not work and then I am directed to go to C:/system32/logfiles/srt/srtTrail.txt as I cannot log into or start windows I cant do this. HELP

when you say "crome" do you mean the google chrome web browser?

gubby

yes sorry Google chrome. I currently use firefox.

jungleman

Google Chrome is a free download, and usually installs quickly and without any problems. Where you went wrong was downloading that repair file, it was a virus or some kind of malware. If you can log into your computer and get onto firefox, download a programme called Malware Bytes. You can get a free 30 day trial and it will remove any malware on your computer.

If you can't log in at all, I'd recommend getting a Windows disk and just reinstalling Windows, to be honest.

And if you paid for that €30 repair thing with a bank card or credit card, I'd cancel them. Whoever you paid that money to has your details now, and if it's a virus I would expect that they'll try to steal money from your account.

gubby

oh god I cant even remember the name of the website I paid. I still cant get on my laptop. how do I get on using safe mode? or would that help.

scruff monkey

You need to get some one who knows what they are doing.

Step 1 : block the credit cards as advised.
Step 2 : Get the HD popped out of the machine and into an enclosure so that what ever data you have on it can be recovered.
Step 3 : when data is recovered, nuke the ****er and get windows installed cleanly
Step 4 : have a system running with an administrator account which is not you, that prevents malicious apps installing at the click of a button.

gubby

I paid with paypal I just checked it there and the payment has gone through to G2S (SC) 22.95 pounds. what can I do now.. can they actually take more money from my paypal? how can I get paypal to block any payments to this site?

jungleman

If you have access to the windows website from another computer, have a look at their Safe Mode tutorial. I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think different laptop brands have their own way of using Safe Mode. So I don't want to be advising you here to press x,y,z and it turns out to be wrong.

If you're really unsure, send it to a repair shop.

Cancel your card, and in future never pay for or click on a pop-up. They are all scams, no matter how convincing they look. If I were you, when your laptop is up and running again, delete Norton or AVG or any anti-virus that comes with it (they are usually intrusive, annoying and take up space) and activate Windows Defender. It comes with every Windows 8 laptop or computer.

ED E

jungleman wrote: »

Cancel your card, and in future never pay for or click on a pop-up. They are all scams, no matter how convincing they look. If I were you, when your laptop is up and running again, delete Norton or AVG or any anti-virus that comes with it (they are usually intrusive, annoying and take up space) and activate Windows Defender. It comes with every Windows 8 laptop or computer.

No need to cancel the card. It was a paypal transaction. Simply change your paypal password on a clean PC to ensure you werent keylogged.

PropJoe10

gubby wrote: »

I paid with paypal I just checked it there and the payment has gone through to G2S (SC) 22.95 pounds. what can I do now.. can they actually take more money from my paypal? how can I get paypal to block any payments to this site?

You wont be able to do anything about the payment you made, as you made it voluntarily, but I would definitely change my password if I were you. Just to reaffirm what someone said there, there is absolutely no need to pay for anything like that these days. Any emails or popups asking for money should be immediately ignored. They are all scams designed to get money/credit card details from people without providing anything useful in return. In fact, these things can be very destructive, especially if they steal your passwords from your computer.

My advice would be to bring the machine to a local PC technician and get them to do a clean install of Windows for you. I personally would not trust a machine that had malicious software on it, even if its cleaned by an antivirus program. A clean install is the only way to make sure that malicious programs are 100% removed.

Just to be clear, this is not a specific issue with Google Chrome. You probably went to an malware 'bait' site to download it. Such sites exist for all programmes.