Oh wow i remember Superchad :lol: ... But yea, with CPU's you have to make sure the motherboard has the correct socket before making any upgrades. 165 isn't bad at all considering your getting another 512mb in ram, a new motherboard and your PC put together/fixed. What processor and motherboard are they installing? If you can post the new hardware info and i'll let you know if they threw you for a loop or not! Doesn't seem so.
I just remembered, this old pc is actually only 128mb. Yes, 128mb! They don't make 'em like they used to. And I didn't ask what kind of motherboard, but I can tell you these guys are the ultimate computer nerds, they know what works and what's junk.
http://www.amazon.com/MSI-K9AGM2-FI...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1201915290&sr=8-1 no reviews, but so far, so good
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130092 to give ya an idea of what people think
So kind of an open ended question and probably not a savvy one either. In my opinion, my girlfriends computer is hanging by a thread. It has had virus problems, spyware problems, connectivity problems and various other problems. Basically she knows how to use a computer but not take care of it. I still think it is a good machine, especially for her level of usage but I fear the best next step would be to wipe it and start over. Unfortunately she doesn't have the XP discs which weren't given to her when she purchased it, which I thought was shady at best. Am I correct in assuming those are a necessary item if I wanted to reformat it? Is there a better way to purge the whole thing for a complete cleansing? Sorry I couldn't be much more descriptive but its all I've got at the moment.
What company is her PC from? In alot of cases they store an image on a partition on the hard drive for system restore purposes completely eliminating the need for an XP CD. If not and you can't find the CD's give the steps a shot.
I want to say HP. I think there is a system restore option in system tools, will that return it to its original state? Assuming she hasn't saved any other restore points since then.
I've been using this and it works. I run it about once a day if I've been surfing around the net, only takes a few minutes. http://www.superantispyware.com/index.html It was referred to me by a Dell tecky a few months ago. Green Dude, have you heard of it? Also I defrag whenever I have been adding or deleting a bunch of files.
My computer is mega-fucked and I really have no idea what to do. About a week ago I started getting these internet explorer popups (I use only ever use firefox) that warned that my computer is infected and that I needed to download their spyware protection. Knowing that these popups were themselves spyware, I kept closing them, ran zonealarm and bought PC Spyware Doctor. I've ran each multiple times, and for the first 10 or so times they both found infections and "removed" them. They lied. The popups kept coming and yesterday morning before I left I went to check something when there were about 6 of those i.e popups and when I tried closing them things really went downhill. Suddenly my desktop got changed to a red thing with a biohazrd sign in the backround and none of the icons worked, so I rebooted and ran zonealarm and Spyware Doctor both of which appeared to actually do the job because the popups stopped and I could a change the desktop picture. But this morning I came down (I put it in sleepmode at night) and the popups were back and the desktop was changed again, taskmanager was disabled and zonealarm and spyware doctor aren't detecting any issues when I scan them. This is a 4 yearold homemade computer so I don't think bringing it into a service shop is a great option, any advice before I go buy a laptop?
^Try taking out your HDD, put it in an external case and scan it with another computer. Scan using Norton/AVG/whatever, run spywareblaster, you can manually explore and searech for recently added files and delete them. Whatever works.
Just a guess- it sounds like a virus that has been going around the last few months called Winter. Do a search on your PC for winter or Winter.exe just to see if it comes up...
Great link. That guy knew his shit, and the comments are pricelessly grateful. So, what happened to this dude who has the popup problem? He asks for help and then doesnt reply?
Sorry, I've been sort of busy trying to get things figured out. I did figure out a way to get taskmanager back running and I still can't find the executable file. I've done some searching around the internet, and it does appear to be part of the winter virus although it isn't identical to what the guy in the blog described. I'm trying to backup my most important files right now and all of the "how to fix it" articles like that blog give advice to go through manually and delete some files, and I'm just worried that I'll delete the wrong thing and make the computer completely useless.
Yep, backup your files, thats the first thing to do. I'm sure there are variations of the winter virus out there. it seems you got one of them. Have you tried to do add/remove? if that is disabled by the virus, and it is in your memory, then you may end up having to uninstall and reinstall your O/S. If you DL the SuperAntiSpyware program I linked in this thread, it will tell you where the infected files are. it breaks it down into three categories. That's another way of telling you where the virus is, but maybe you will be lucky and that program will be able to quarantine and delete it for you.
OK in need of some help here. My brother's PC has lost it's internet connection and it may have been caused by a virus. He said he saw a message pop up from his anti-virus about a Trojan, and since then his connection stopped working. He has Symantec anti-virus installed and strangely enough it did not detect any infected files when I ran a virus scan (last update was on Feb. 13). The PC also has Linux installed on it and the internet works fine from there so it seems to be an issue with Windows rather than a hardware thing. Nothing else seems to be affected, just the dropped internet connection. I'll try to gather more info soon but what are the first steps I should take with this? Thanks.
