For the second time in a week, I find myself repairing someone’s laptop.
The first laptop was Mom’s, which was absolutely ravaged with those awful “fake antivirus” viruses. I ran Malwarebytes, which removed 28 infections … then I rebooted, ran it again, and it removed another 18. I was still getting pop-ups, so I then switched to Ad-Aware. Then Spy-Bot. Each program I ran found another 20 or so infected files. TrendMicro’s House Call, a web based scanner, found another 59 infections. Even with all the infections seemingly gone, Internet Explorer was still acting wonky by redirecting Google results to malware sites, and I never could get Windows Update to run. They sure don’t write viruses like they used to. What sucks is, she was even running antivirus when she got infected! After confirming that Mom had backed up her files elsewhere, it was lights out for that laptop. Two hours after that decision was made, Mom got a free upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. Game, set, match.
Yesterday, work began on Andy’s laptop. Andy had sent me a cell phone picture he had taken of his laptop sitting at the BIOS screen and had added the word “Yikes!” When I began looking at it, the laptop would get to the Windows splash screen, blue screen, and then reboot. That’s usually a sign of either a bad or corrupted driver, or hard drive failure. I booted the laptop using an old Winternal ERD boot CD in hopes of copying off the data, but found I couldn’t access the hard drive at all. Yikes, indeed. I ended up running chkdsk /r twice (the first time found so many errors it timed out) and was finally able to access the drive. I don’t trust this hard drive and since I know Andy has every family picture he owns stored on it, I am currently making an (encrypted) image of it and storing it in my closet. If he never needs it, no harm no foul.
Working on laptops is so much easier than the old days of working on towers. Before the days of KVMs, I would have to drag a monitor, keyboard and mouse out of the closet or garage and clean off a space to work for a few days. Laptops are so much more convenient. For example, don’t tell Andy, but his is currently perched on top of a glass of Kool-Aid at the moment …
I know I’m not telling you anything that you don’t already know, but trying to remove malware from a laptop is like trying to do surgery on a patient who hasn’t been anesthetized. The best thing to do is to remove the hard drive and slave it into a clean machine to run anti-malware and anti-virus tools. Granted this isn’t always an easy option, depending on the type of HDD the laptop uses, but it’s usually effective enough without requiring a rebuild.
On the other hand, the choice to get your mom off Vista and onto Win 7 was a no-brainer.
Sounds like… well… every computer where I work right now. It’s like somebody’s idea of data security was to borrow a copy of Edgarware from Strongbad.
My solution is to offer a total flush ultimatum. Want files and photos? Take it to a store. Want a total wipe? Fine, drop it off at your leisure. So done fighting malware. Just not doing it any more. Oh, and my spare monitor died so you need to bring yours…..
THE
COMPUTER
HEALTH CARE REFORMED
AARDVARK
So I have this laptop and it’s slow and now I get a bsod oh by the way every picture I own is on it ……one last thing I leave town tomorrow at 4:30 tomorrow so when can I drop it off and how long will this take : ) ……..jk but heather actually broke people for me she tells them he will be happy to look at it but it will be a month by the time he looks at it and gets it back to you
I have a great policy when it comes to PC’s that are infected. BEFORE I ever touch a machine, it gets a windows image updated to image file on my storage closet. So if I ever have to restore such a machine to a previous state, at least the operating system is the LAST place I need to start rebuilding from scratch..
Now I noticed That Windows Vista and 7 both have DVD options to write the OS to DVD? That might be another option than having to do a total wipe. If you have it on DVD, you just tell them to use that to write out the DVDs before they get into trouble and if they ever run into a problem to have offsite backup of their personal data. (of course at a very MINIMUM these with heavy key encryption.)
So far the only way I know not to get viruses is called UNIX. It can be Linux, or Unix as such, or Mac OSx, or BSD, or… virtually any variant of UNIX. Anything else is a waste of time: Windows equals viruses. Short and simple.
Mom was happy to leave Vista behind! And since I’m retired almost no files on my computer are very important. My pictures are another story, so I keep them in several places to begin with. And I’m extremely lucky to have a smart son who takes pity on me!!
McAfee has a great tool called “stinger”, a stand alone scanner. There are two versions, one that is directed at the “fake alert” trojan which is common right now. I run that with malwarebytes, trojan remover (simplysup.org 30 day free trial after which I just remove it) and Avira (free-av.com).
That’s typically all I ever need to remove infections these days.