A Day of Miserable Defeat to Viruses…
I got absolutely schooled and destroyed today by viruses, it’s not even funny. Here’s how it worked :
One of my close associates that I help out often needed a favour - he got a new laptop for his daughter and needed it set up and all. So I went ahead to install some software, including the Norton Antivirus 2007 Suite, downloaded from a torrent source. The keygen.exe file which is used to crack the software was infected with a virus. Of course, the irony is that an anti-virus software downloads with a virus in itself.
When I rebooted, NOTHING but the last Windows Explorer windows showed up. Black screen, no start menu bar, no background photo, no desktop, no bars, no buttons. Just 1 window floating in the middle of a black screen - that was it. The evening was getting late, so I had to bring the laptop home to fix it up.
In that process, I had attempted to download the keygen file on my own laptop, and tried running it but failed - and now I came home, re-booted my laptop, and I have the same symptoms. My own laptop is screwed. I’m writing this on my spare laptop which runs Windows XP, that sits on my desk at all times.
So, I ended up with 2 laptops that are completely nuked by viruses and I do not know of any way to fix it. I tried manually running the system restore program through the task manager (which I can still get by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Delete), but it failed. The program won’t even run.
Right now I’m trying to back up some of the most recent changes I made (I still have a backup from a week ago on my gigantic external harddrive), and see what steps I need to take to revive these computers. If anybody knows a solution that does not involve re-formatting my entire computer (which will take about 4 hours to wipe and then re-install everything) please let me know.
I run Windows Vista Home Premium.
Hey Jeff
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, and hopefully someone has a genius answer that will spare you from it, but a very similiar pain in the butt incident happened to my computer. I did have to wipe it out and reinstall EVERYTHING:( What really sucks is I didn’t have a backup of everything. Very few things were salvaged because they were on my jump drive. Good luck. It is a sucky situation to be in, not to mention a tick off! Joan
Viruses are frustrating…especially when people attach them to torrent downloads! Hmm…I would suggest taking out the 2.5″ hard drive from the laptop and putting it into an external 2.5″ USB enclosure. That way you can try to salvage some important data. After that, put the drive back in and format that beeyatch to ensure it will be clean.
AVG Free is a good solution nowadays for antivirus…give that a try next time if you haven’t already.
Hey Gdog. What do you think about spysweper with anti virus? It too is free:)
Contact Saman at Samanathon Dot Com. I bet he could help you.
Tried this ?
http://www.avast.com/eng/down_cleaner.html
http://www.grisoft.com/
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best_46_free_utilities.htm#2
Viruses are frustrating…especially when people attach them to torrent downloads! Hmm…I would suggest taking out the 2.5″ hard drive from the laptop and putting it into an external 2.5″ USB enclosure. T
Thanks !!
http://www.grisoft.com/