Fun with puters part three

Wear protection.....

Published on May 21, 2005 By Jafo In Personal Computing

A friend complained her XP machine was 'acting up' and brave old me said 'no sweat...I'm a consumate genius and modestly can fix it in a jiffy'.

She brung it over me joint and I rolled up the proverbials and got stuck into it.

Bit of a mess was putting it mildly....it hadn't a firewall or AV running for 'some time'.

I found a dozen or two 'issues' with it ...before pulling out the drive and chucking it in a caddy to load into my own machine...to do a thorough clean....

Norton got about 39 .... Pest patrol a further 26 then Ad Aware got the last...another 20 or so.....about 75 in all, ranging from key-loggers, 4 virii, trojan loaders and trackers...usual crap.

Then it was a simple case of copying all the 'data' to backup, full format, repartition and dump the data back on the 'D'.

All well and good.

Put the drive back into her machine...installed her XP and loaded a freeware ver of AVG.

Of course, that was out of date....needed new signature files, so I got on dial-up to update them....went to make a coffee.

Came back half an hour later....

ERROR on download.......

Something was wrong...so I did a drive scan with the 'old' AVG, and Ad Aware.....

303 hits

Oops, thinks I....perhaps it'd be wise to load that Zone Alarm first, before hooking to the net.

ZA pops up....."Ist.exe" wants access...."bugger off", I say.

A rush of frantic denials and several sweeps of the system later and I'm back to squeaky clean again.

Still....she's happy, now....

Moral of the story....get yer protection BEFORE hooking to the pox-ridden net...

Comments (Page 2)

Corky_O

on May 23, 2005

For some reason, I have no issues with SP2 - though it may be because most of my software is from 2002 and 2003 which seems to have had the bugs fixed early on in the life of SP2.

I have indeed seen that SP2 can create some problems at work with older databases, so I agree that care must be used when deploying it in large networks with older hardware and obsolescent programs.

The Dell notebook I purchased is a 2005 model, so they built it after SP2 came out, and it runs the 915 chipset and a PCIe bus with compatible hardware which include drivers written for XP w/SP2. Symantec also managed to write a fix for NIS 2003 so it communicates with the XP firewall and allows peaceful coexistence.

All in all, I really like the Notebook, especially the fact that Dell made this thing easy to upgrade in all aspects of hardware.

Fabulous fun.

kona0197

on May 23, 2005

Well my system is not that old and I have many problems after SP2 installs - the biggest one being the whole systems seems to slow to a crawl.

In case your wondering - I have a Nvidia Nforce2 chipset.

PurrBall

on May 24, 2005

sp2 fine here.

i have never gotten viruses or been hijacked, even through those 2-3 years i didnt have an internet security solution.

Chris TH

on May 24, 2005

the biggest one being the whole systems seems to slow to a crawl.

Should be easy enough to track down... what have you looked at to diagnose it?

I've got SP2 installed on 4 different machines (1 laptop 3 desktops including a 633MHz PIII, all XP Pro) with no problems at all.

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Fuzzy Logic

on May 24, 2005

Step #4 - Go to Windows Update and install all patches I want.

Step #5 - Install AV and Internet Security software (I like Symantec, so that's the one).

Do that the other way round. Don't even think about connecting without a firewall being installed

Zoomba

on May 24, 2005

As the fix-it guy for friends, family, and a number of coworkers here in the IT department, I've had to go through the fun experience of cleaning up a hopelessly infected PC. I've done it so many times I have a CD with a standard set of apps I load up on a machine before plugging in the network cable. Sadly, within a few weeks, the user disables everything I installed because they think it's slowing them down, so shortly after that I'm back at the machine working on it again.

I've gone so far as to remove admin access on my parents PC, and tell people if their machine shows up at my desk with Norton or ZoneAlarm disabled, or if they aren't reasonably up to date with WindowsUpdate, I won't fix it again. It's a simple matter to keep your PC in working order... Hell, people change the oil in their cars religiously, this isn't much different from that.

Corky_O

on May 24, 2005

Do that the other way round. Don't even think about connecting without a firewall being installed

In most cases, I would agree.

Because I did not want all the extra "stuff" they include - I requested the installation disc, which is XP with SP2 (all drivers are available from site) - so the XP firewall was automatically turned on after clean install.

Grabbed the critical patches from Windows Update, then installed the NIS 2003.

Fuzzy Logic

on May 24, 2005

Trust the XP firewall do you?

kona0197

on May 24, 2005

Should be easy enough to track down... what have you looked at to diagnose it?

At this point it's just easier to uninstall SP2 and not use it.

Corky_O

on May 24, 2005

Trust the XP firewall do you?

Only enough to go to Windows Update - not for anything else.

I prefer to install all the OS files - including available patches - when doing a clean install. I feel there is a greater chance of things going correctly with the OS if I take care of that first, then install the third party software.

If I had to go to any site other than MS to get OS updates - NIS 2003 would go in first.

thomassen

on May 24, 2005

Corky - the best way to ruin a new PC is by installing SP2 - you know that right?

A new PC shouldn't be ruined by SP2. It would be third party software using programming hacks and shortcuts in their software. Some of these had to be blocked of in SP2 because they where liable to security issues.

Chris TH

on May 24, 2005

At this point it's just easier to uninstall SP2 and not use it.

*Sigh* Well, it's your loss...

I'm curious though, are you still able to install all the Windows critical security updates that have come out post-SP2?

kona0197

on May 24, 2005

I'm curious though, are you still able to install all the Windows critical security updates that have come out post-SP2?

Yep I am able to install updates that have come out after sP2 - but a few of those screwed my system up as well.

Chris TH

on May 24, 2005

but a few of those screwed my system up as well.

I'd be guessing that's because you need SP2 installed!

unckle fester

on May 25, 2005

If I ever get my hands on one of the retards who thinks Hijackers are kewl I'll slit his nostrils...

hey jafo, they hang out at yahoo pool, champions zone, might need to use a back door to get in but they'll be there. had some trouble there once, never bet a hacker they can't hack you... lol, its brutal! now i keep everthing on an external drive and only turn it on when i need something from it

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