<Computer Problems> Holy shit viruses raped my comp...

[Andarvi]

Im lazy, very lazy, and partly dumb as well. I have a very outdated version of norton and never run any antispyware. I know, retarded. Months, and I mean many months, of accumulating problems have now reached a climax.

Any help or feedback as to the reason/solution for these problems save telling me its because of viruses which I know would be greatly appreciated.

1 - Before today I would turn my comp on, it would come to the desktop, and after my wallpaper loaded would take roughly 45min for the icons to come on. After this, it would be fine, though I never knew why it did this. Any ideas?

2- So today the internet seems to be crawling even for my diseased comp so I decide to dust off adaware personal and give it a good old run. Surprisingly, it only found roughly 500 objects. Ive found over 2000 in the past. This is where it gets interesting tho. So i delete all the cookies and also noticed during the scan norton is popping up with a shit ton of viruses many of which it cannot delete. Upon the conclusion of the scans, my comp is worse than before.
-I used to use internet explorer (yeah yeah, stupid, i know). When i tried to open it after the scan it gave me some retarded error everytime and wouldnt work.
-The comp started to freeze up badly as i was playing gunbound and minimizing, which usually works fine. Then, the text under all my icons and what not gets much bigger, say from 10 arial font to maybe 16? Frustrated i restart the comp.
-When it restarts, IE still doesnt work, mozilla does. When i try to open any program besides battlefield vietnam it shows the little hourglass of loading then stops. My documents takes at least 5 min to open. If i try to open IE it just fucks everything up and makes the thing barely work. Worst of all, ALL the text is now so small i cant even read it. At most its like a 1 font.

For starters, how do i change the font size of my icons and basically everything back to normal? Any detailed explanations of whats goin on with these problems? At this point i just want to be able to read the stuff so i can do a backup of my shit and do a restore.

Any constructive feedback would be peachy, thanks.

[Stamp]

Sounds like you should just format



>.>

[Popeh]

Format everytime ;p

Why bother spending hours and hours trying to sort it and never getting it as good as it could be.
Grab yourself a USB hard drive (or DVD-RW for the more labourous) and back up everything you wanna keep (including your ffxi folder if you wish to keep all your macro's).

Run your PC's recovery program selecting complete format and install and enjoy spending the next 2 days setting everything up again.

Make sure you run an up to date scanner on your backed up content before transferring back across. Free online scanner available at http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

Hope that helps

[Haelian]

I personally would NOT reformat. My Windows XP disc is quite old itself, and doesn't have anywhere near enough protection to stop viruses from invading as soon as I connect to the internet after reformatting (without even opening IE or Firefox). Might not be the case with you, but I've found if you don't have ALL the XP updates, you're vulnerable.

Definitely sounds like you're infested with viruses. Your only real options are either to run a sophisticated and updated virus scanner (Norton, McAffee, Spyware Doctor) or reformat (even though I still think you're gonna need a virus scanner either way).

Something else you could TRY and do is the olde CTRL+ALT+DEL Task Manager check. You check on any suspicious looking processes by just Googling the name of the process (i.e. msmsg.exe) and they should give you some kind of a manual solution to getting rid of it. I've tried doing this myself, and it typically doesn't work out and can also be rather risky. Chances are even if you go and find the .exe file and (manage to) delete it, it will duplicate itself right back afterwards. And there's always the chance you delete some kind of necessary file or registry key or whathaveit.

As for font sizes, I found this page on Google which might help:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=310543
I've never experienced this myself so I don't know anything about it.

Hope you can fix it without too much work.

[Demosthenes]

AVG is free. Get it.

[Xiona]

run computer in safe mode, run hijackthis and look for things that shouldnt be there. after hijackthis removes them run your virus scanner and adware scanners. this should get rid of the problems for the most part or at least it worked for me.

reboot and keep checking to see if anything new pops up. if not then your good if so then try again to see if you missed anything.

i use spybot search & destroy, AVG, windows defender and hijackthis

i had 1-2 virus that were a pain in the ass, everytime id delete one another one would take its place.

[budd]

I personally would NOT reformat. My Windows XP disc is quite old itself, and doesn't have anywhere near enough protection to stop viruses from invading as soon as I connect to the internet after reformatting (without even opening IE or Firefox). Might not be the case with you, but I've found if you don't have ALL the XP updates, you're vulnerable.

Bust out your XP CD (Unless its OEM, then I'm not sure if it works or not, but it possibly could.)

Get Service Pack 2. Go to RyanVM's site, get the Post-SP2 Update pack, and the RVM integrator.

Make a folder on your desktop, and copy the contents of your XP cd to it. Slipstream SP2 to it from the file menu in the RVM integrator.

Using the integrator is easy, after it integrates, you just point to the folder with your i386 folder in it (the folder you created with Windows XP in it), the destination output folder (make a new one), and an update pack (the post sp2 .7z file). Press the "Integrate" button, step away for a bit. When it finishes, click the Make ISO tab, create one, and burn it like you would any other ISO cd image.

Bam. Up-to-date Windows XP cd.


Note: Don't know if this works with pirated CD keys.

[Almaa]

I have no anti-virus and rarely run adaware and I never have problems, whereas my dad installed like 50 utilities to keep his computer safe and he is blocked from half the interweb and his computer crashes and runs like ass. Go figure.

[Moochi]

nod32

[Epical]

I have no anti-virus and rarely run adaware and I never have problems, whereas my dad installed like 50 utilities to keep his computer safe and he is blocked from half the interweb and his computer crashes and runs like ass. Go figure.

Lol so true. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what's shady and what's not on the internet. Don't download from sites that prompt you to download something you haven't even clicked, but are named "setup.exe".

w

[Aourace]

Format. Plain and simple. Get a start fresh, and your computer will probably work a helluva a lot better after a complete wipe.

[Cletis]

download more porn.. that'll fix it for sure

[Popeh]

download more porn.. that'll fix it for sure

!!

[Cletis]

hiya poopie =D