Sometimes I like being self employed and doing computer work for others. I guess you could even say like to help people - but the two most recent jobs were fixing malware/virus infected computers for elderly people. That in itself isn't a problem, the problem is they are people who don't really have the money to pay someone, in the case me, an amount that is "reasonable" (to me) just for the time I spend cleaning up the mess.
Saturday and Sunday afternoons I worked on a pretty nice custom and locally built computer with Windows XP on it. The system had obviously been infected and the customer had used the normal adware/spyware removal tools to eliminate all but two things. First there was a registry key that was pointing to a now non-existing program (which I later figured out was the malware) and was causing some issues after bootup (i.e. the system is looking to load something that doesn't exist). The second part is that the customer's AV software (bit defender) was completely hosed and would crash on startup. I took care of the registry key by setting it to zero and advised the customer to reinstall BD. I probably spent around 5-8 hours working on it trying to figure out why BD was crashing and what-all had been done. In the end I only charged for one hours worth of work. It wasn't too hard of a job, just time consuming.
The job that I got this morning is pretty bad and I'm still working on it. It had 100s of instances of about 10 different trojans, adware, spyware, etc. bit defender 2010 bootcd could only find one of them. spybot finds 100s but can't remove 12 of them. Next step is to install a new AV program in safe mode under a new user account and go from there...
Saturday and Sunday afternoons I worked on a pretty nice custom and locally built computer with Windows XP on it. The system had obviously been infected and the customer had used the normal adware/spyware removal tools to eliminate all but two things. First there was a registry key that was pointing to a now non-existing program (which I later figured out was the malware) and was causing some issues after bootup (i.e. the system is looking to load something that doesn't exist). The second part is that the customer's AV software (bit defender) was completely hosed and would crash on startup. I took care of the registry key by setting it to zero and advised the customer to reinstall BD. I probably spent around 5-8 hours working on it trying to figure out why BD was crashing and what-all had been done. In the end I only charged for one hours worth of work. It wasn't too hard of a job, just time consuming.
The job that I got this morning is pretty bad and I'm still working on it. It had 100s of instances of about 10 different trojans, adware, spyware, etc. bit defender 2010 bootcd could only find one of them. spybot finds 100s but can't remove 12 of them. Next step is to install a new AV program in safe mode under a new user account and go from there...
scarlaa:
Congratulations! You are one of the few people who can explain technology exceptionally well!
canutethegreat:
Thank you. Although I need to proofread for grammatical errors before posting I see... 