So my home laptop has some sort of virus. I can connect to the internet only if I start a VPN session first. Spent about 10 hrs trying to get rid of it. I just hope I can salvage my pictures before I reformat. Dang it all

No Porsche stuff lately; no time.

 

Hang in there, bud.

...go to your quiet place, Jeff...

...just before apex, squeezing onto the loud pedal, rpms coming up nicely past 4,500... back end coming out just a little under the power... solid push to your back... and there's your exit line... gas-gas-gas...

(-don't know 'bout you, but that thought makes my morning.)

 

It's the slide through the corner onto the on ramp and the all out rapid climb to 90 as I enter the freeway that gets me going in the morning.

hawk911: If your pictures are very important you can take the hard drive out of your laptop and get one of those USB drive kits and then hook it to another computer. This will give you access to all the files on the drive and the virus will not be active (I would screen and clean the drive before transfering files). This may also get rid of your virus problems and keep you from formatting.

Best of luck.

 

Aero- thanks for the tip. I'm hoping to just move the pictures to my external, and then reformat the main. I have XP media center anyway; back to XP pro.

 

Hawk do you know when you got the virus??? if so you can do a windows search and find all files created on that date. Then start up in safe mode and remove anything that looks suspicious from that list. Also have you tried like that ADaware program or somthing????

 

I got one in mine last week that was tied into the Weatherchannel Desktop weather. It would redirect me everytime I tried to read Yahoo mail in Firefox. Spybot, Norton and Adaware could not remove it. I uninstalled Weather desktop and it went out with it. Good luck Geoff
Pcar related i have the warning light for the fan belt on and the wheel and belt both seem fine. i will hook up Scan and turn it off and see what happens. I had washed the dust off the car a few minutes before it came on when driving so hopefully it was water related.

 

Car is booked into the body shop for Wednesday (thanks to all for advice) it will probably take the best part of a week to know what the options are (if any). In the meantime I am going to get my rental today, either a Cadillac DTS or Mercedes 300 appear to be the options. Probably take the Mercedes.

 

well, at this point I've run system restore several times, ad-aware 2008, Network Associates virus scan, cache cleaner, and spy bot search & destroy. No luck with any of those. My laptop worked Wed, so I could try to find files on or after Wed.

Thanks for the suggestions.

 

Try this site and download "highjack this" this program works well and it's free

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download3155.html

 

oh yeah- got that one too, but what's it tell me? I wrote the results to a log file.

 

I had to read the instructions a couple of times but in the end it worked out..

 

Hawk911, it sounds as though whatever malicious files are on your laptop are attempting to redirect traffic and that's why you need to connect to your VPN to get internet. Check there are not unusual proxy settings in Internet Explorer and also make sure there are no hidden entries in your hosts file. Failing all this, 2 other scanners worth a shot include www.superantispyware.com (snappy name!) and the MS onecare secuirty scanner. Good luck.

 

Get a mac. Have not had a crash for years. Or a virus. Ever. And besides, they are just better machines.

 

Hawk,

last time I had a virus, was running Norton AV 2007. Discovered the file was marked as hidden in the sytem file. Once set to visible antivirus grabbed it straight away, problem solve. Was a PITA for a while until I unhid all files.

Steve