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Can anyone recommend a useful free anti-virus program?
danny_galaga:
My freebie XP laptop is in dire straights. This morning I booted it up. First thing I noticed was a dialog box for the wireless connection was open. Then Avast said it had updated its data base. I went to click on something, and it didn't open, but remained highlighted. Strange, so I clicked on something else and now they BOTH remained highlighted. Then a third thing. Clicking something else unhighlighted them again. I hit CTRL ALT DELETE to see what was happening. When it opened, the help dialog opened. I clicked that closed, and it started multiplying. Soon all sort of ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- were opening up and multiplying!
The guy I got this off had a friend freshen it up before he gave it to me. He told him that there was a virus he had trouble getting rid of. I guess he never did!
It's a damn hard problem to google. You can imagine that if I google 'virus multiplying help', i get lots of hits for West Nile Virus etc :duckhunt
Also, for a little while anything I typed was in some other text (like wing dings or something). I've just removed MSN explorer and Outlook Express, which I'd been meaning to do, since they are useless and I recall are useful exploits for some virii. I want to get to system restore as well right now, it won't help the virus of course, but I just want to put a short cut on the desk top. But now another problem is that things won't stay open long enough in menus to select them!
Any chance anyone knows what virus this is?
More importantly, can anyone recommend any useful free anti virus software? I managed to scan the whole machine with Avast just now, which doesn't see a problem, so obviously don't recommend THAT to me ;D I used to use AVG, but I don't recall if it was actually any good. If no one has a better idea, that's what I'll go with though...
Samstag:
Take off and nuke the laptop from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure.
Howard_Casto:
Ok something we need to clarify.
There's anti-virus programs, there's resident shields, there's anti-malware programs, and there's mal-ware removal tools.
For your initial problem you probably just need to wipe the drive unless you have a lot setup on it.
What you want is a program that has a really strong resident shield and antivirus. The resident shield will catch stuff before it's ever loaded onto your computer. The antis virus will find any dormant files that the alert didn't catch. This is what AVG is good for... it's quite good at catching stuff before you launch it or before a webpage run an active-x or java exploit. However once a virus gets launched, it'll probably install malware, which is NOT the same as the virus itself. None of your major anti-virus programs are very good at catching malware once it's been ran. So basically once you are infected, you have to manually use more hardware mallware/rootkit removal tools. They are often a pain in the butt, thus why I suggest just wiping the hdd for an inital fresh start.
So yeah, I still prefer avg if the machine can handle it. Microsoft's free tools/shields would be your next best bet. Avast is pretty crappy imho, but your mileage will vary.
Gray_Area:
Treat any non-indigenous drive as contaminated. Wipe it, and install. Next, read and re-read Howard's thread. Look round at CNET and stuff on different programs.
Dervacumen:
Don't recognize those symptoms so I can't help with ID.
Try setting Avast to scan upon system startup then reboot. I've had success with it finding things is didn't otherwise detect.
Otherwise:
I would run hijack this! first and remove anything that was obvious. If you aren't comfortable using hijack this!, skip it and run spybot search and destroy. Then follow it up with a full scan using AVG, Avast, or better yet go to www.kaspersky.com and download a 30 day free trial and use that.
I used to use AVG and liked it a lot. Then some more recent versions bombarded me with nag screens so I switched to Avast. I've been using Avast on all my machines for about three years now. I've been happy with it.
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