Well it seems the lady has come into a few cooties.

She has an xps m1210 laptop.

Since neither of us know just how long the stuff has been on her machine or where or how they all got there, I believe it would be in her best interest if we just back up everything that is important and whip out the reinstall discs. Easy? lol. Newp. No chance. Seems back when she got the computer she lived elsewhere with someone else and obtaining the drivers discs and o/s and all teh bundled software discs had to include a spy. Her little sister had to sneak the border and play friendlies… Now she snuck out with the baggy thing that all the discs are in which of course no one there claims to have seen. We have done some searches and find that one disc on the bag, is not for this laptop that we are about to work on. Ok. Now we have all the discs.

The hard part is deciding what to do after we install everything and well, does the sister go back and act like nothing happened? ( I mean this is a close as family issue, I am not in the family so I have to step back) I am thinking of burning the discs as a back up and bundling some jacked up progs with it.. but will they hate me for it?

well whatever

Ok So now the back up is not going so well. I have been to virustotal ,virscan.org and jotti’s a million times and man, I keep finding malware in everything she wants to backup. I am half tempted to just format and cross my fingers and lie like a dog. I am getting sick of each time they find stuff in the files I end up having to delete them anyway because they are beyond repair. Meanwhile I have a million more files to scan…one by one….. It’s hardly worth it. Then again she is fricken hot and I know what I am doing.
Well I also looked around and saw that ubuntu installs pretty good on this particular model. If I can assure her that open office is just as good as microsoft office/works then I got it made! I wouldn’t have to delete anything!
Tell you what, I will do something with this pretty machine and post it here later

to be continued…….

After years of not touching Dr.Web, I could not remember, in full, why I did not like it. I could not remember why I did not trust it. It has been at least five years since I tried it and someone I see is trusted by quite a few people recommends it. I gave it a go. Well the first download is 14 MB. Quite tiny and happens in a blink — although the file downloaded was actually just a tool to download the actual program. After the download was complete and the install was nearly finished, it asked for a verification key (I did not have one). So the program allowed me to press a button and have a key automatically inserted. Why? Dunno. The scan seemed pretty smooth; I didn’t see the scanner get hung up on anything. The list of files being scanned was pretty steady. Boots and reboots of the system were smooth and there was no delay or hang time from Dr.Web.

I consider any program that you have to find a program from a second party to remove to be malware. If the program does not allow me to see the size of the actual install until after it is finished installing (I had to navigate to the folder it was contained in), I consider it to be deceptive.

Granted, this is a workplace computer. I am not the first employee to use this computer and formatting it is not an option. I did find traces of Limewire once installed on this machine, so you should have a pretty good idea how beat down this machine is because of misuse. Since this program found nothing and ran smoothly, I decided to break out some of the tried and true programs: Ad-Aware, Spybot, and A-Squared. All three found something, and no, it was not all cookies. Ad-Aware found what it labeled as a w32.novarg.a@mm (aka MY DOOM) file. A-Squared found a few hijackers, and Spybot found, like, 60 things.

Now here comes the issue. I decided I do not need this program to start when I start my computer. Since it never found anything, I was not impressed enough that I could leave it on the workplace computer throughout the trial period. I went to un-install Dr.Web, but it wasn’t happening. The un-install actually tries to install the program again. I went through the whole step of seeing if it would say “before we can install you must un-install; would you like to un-install?” Never happened. Full install right over the current.

So I did a Google search on it. The best information I found was sad and scary, all in one. Delete all registry entries and then go back to the directory of install and delete all signs of Dr.Web. I really do not suggest you do that. I mean, it did not damage this machine. I booted fine afterwards with no errors, but if you are new to ‘regedit,’ stay out. It is much safer that way.

After 14 years of doing this online and nine years on local networks (before the Internet), you would think I learned my lesson. Well, I have learned that sometimes you just have to try stuff and be prepared to put things back together. Good thing I do and can.

Here’s an alternative.

TruXter

Owner and writer of :

iworkwithtech.com  and iworkwithpeople.com 

Let’s look at a free online virus scanner compared to Norton antivirus

I scanned with Norton first and found nothing, then scanned again with bit defender online free virus scanner.

what do you think is the better choice?