I hate fixing computers
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I'm sorting out a friends mothers PC - Chrome wouldn't load any pages at all, and it turns out she uses Norton Antivirus and something had turned it off... But how did she browser the internet? She had pretty much every single toolbar you could download installed - to the point where her browse window was only one inch tall...
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.
I get those all the time, just finished one for one of the Wife's friend "as a favor". Usually takes a good amount of time to clean those buggers out. I always tell them "Just say no to toolbars!" :) (I know that most of them are installed without their knowledge.) All I can say is RKill is indespensible for helping to clean some of that %$#@! out.
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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I get those all the time, just finished one for one of the Wife's friend "as a favor". Usually takes a good amount of time to clean those buggers out. I always tell them "Just say no to toolbars!" :) (I know that most of them are installed without their knowledge.) All I can say is RKill is indespensible for helping to clean some of that %$#@! out.
It was broke, so I fixed it.
I've gone for the "FORMAT C:" option :-D
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.
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I'm sorting out a friends mothers PC - Chrome wouldn't load any pages at all, and it turns out she uses Norton Antivirus and something had turned it off... But how did she browser the internet? She had pretty much every single toolbar you could download installed - to the point where her browse window was only one inch tall...
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.
Did the same thing for my father a couple of weeks ago. Cleaned up his hard drive, installed more memory, MSE, and made a shorcut to Chrome on his desktop clearly labeled INTERNET. Using IE, Norton and Yahoo had brought his machine to it's knees.
What me worry?
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I'm sorting out a friends mothers PC - Chrome wouldn't load any pages at all, and it turns out she uses Norton Antivirus and something had turned it off... But how did she browser the internet? She had pretty much every single toolbar you could download installed - to the point where her browse window was only one inch tall...
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.
Doing the same for a friend last week who had been hit by a scareware package - after removing some of the offending grot, I started up the browser and started to type Google in the address bar - as soon as I typed the first G, what popped up in the browser history? "Gagged and bound women"! I pretended not to have seen this, and continued to the search engine ;)
==================================== Transvestites - Roberts in Disguise! ====================================
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Doing the same for a friend last week who had been hit by a scareware package - after removing some of the offending grot, I started up the browser and started to type Google in the address bar - as soon as I typed the first G, what popped up in the browser history? "Gagged and bound women"! I pretended not to have seen this, and continued to the search engine ;)
==================================== Transvestites - Roberts in Disguise! ====================================
Maybe he likes the strong silent type? :~
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.
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I've gone for the "FORMAT C:" option :-D
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.
That is my preferred method as well, and on occasion actually do a reinstall. But those pesky family photos, music downloads and videos take up more space that than I have DVDs to spare. (I guess I have to start charging them fees... damn my gerousity generosity.) < edit > :-O < / edit>
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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I've gone for the "FORMAT C:" option :-D
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.
OriginalGriff wrote:
"FORMAT C:" option
I didn't know there was any other option... ;P
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
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Doing the same for a friend last week who had been hit by a scareware package - after removing some of the offending grot, I started up the browser and started to type Google in the address bar - as soon as I typed the first G, what popped up in the browser history? "Gagged and bound women"! I pretended not to have seen this, and continued to the search engine ;)
==================================== Transvestites - Roberts in Disguise! ====================================
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I'm sorting out a friends mothers PC - Chrome wouldn't load any pages at all, and it turns out she uses Norton Antivirus and something had turned it off... But how did she browser the internet? She had pretty much every single toolbar you could download installed - to the point where her browse window was only one inch tall...
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.
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That is my preferred method as well, and on occasion actually do a reinstall. But those pesky family photos, music downloads and videos take up more space that than I have DVDs to spare. (I guess I have to start charging them fees... damn my gerousity generosity.) < edit > :-O < / edit>
It was broke, so I fixed it.
S Houghtelin wrote:
damn my gerousity geriatricity
FTFY
When I was a coder, we worked on algorithms. Today, we memorize APIs for countless libraries — those libraries have the algorithms - Eric Allman
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Similar thing happened to my folks computer a few years ago. Brand new with the OS already installed as they are these days. No network connection, no internet, no nothing. Network adapter can't even get an IP address. The reason? Preinstalled McAfee.
Well, then, McAfee was preventing them from getting a virus from the internet, right? Mission accomplished!
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Well, then, McAfee was preventing them from getting a virus from the internet, right? Mission accomplished!
You could say McAfee took their responsibilities very seriously. So seriously that they disabled DHCP and also prevented me from entering a manually assigned address. We first thought that it was the network card that was on the blink because it wasn't accepting any kind of address.
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You could say McAfee took their responsibilities very seriously. So seriously that they disabled DHCP and also prevented me from entering a manually assigned address. We first thought that it was the network card that was on the blink because it wasn't accepting any kind of address.
If you thought that was bad, my brother had a McAfee trial pre-installed when he bought his laptop. When it expired, it blocked his internet connection. So, I thought, let's remove it, then. Well, no. Going to control panel, selecting McAfee Security Center (or whatever it's called) and clicking Change/Remove did nothing, except making Windows Installer think it was running an installer, preventing me from removing anything else. I had to go through Safe Mode to successfully remove it. A couple of years earlier when helping someone else, I had a similar problem with Norton Internet security, where removing Norton also removed the 'System Tools' directory in the Start Menu. tldr; Seems like the Antivirus tools are becoming viruses themselves.
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If you thought that was bad, my brother had a McAfee trial pre-installed when he bought his laptop. When it expired, it blocked his internet connection. So, I thought, let's remove it, then. Well, no. Going to control panel, selecting McAfee Security Center (or whatever it's called) and clicking Change/Remove did nothing, except making Windows Installer think it was running an installer, preventing me from removing anything else. I had to go through Safe Mode to successfully remove it. A couple of years earlier when helping someone else, I had a similar problem with Norton Internet security, where removing Norton also removed the 'System Tools' directory in the Start Menu. tldr; Seems like the Antivirus tools are becoming viruses themselves.
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I've never had that problem with Norton to be honest. McAfee has always proven problematic, even before the issue with my folks' PC.
Despite me personally not liking McAfee, it has nothing to do with it. Hooking network level stuff in Windows at such low level is really nasty and hacky usually. Especially if you want to keep it compatible with windows XP. I've seen this 'no traffic allowed, even DHCP' error happening with everything from Norton to F-secure to Kaspersky to ZoneAlarm. Usually fixes with a complete reinstall of the software.
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If you thought that was bad, my brother had a McAfee trial pre-installed when he bought his laptop. When it expired, it blocked his internet connection. So, I thought, let's remove it, then. Well, no. Going to control panel, selecting McAfee Security Center (or whatever it's called) and clicking Change/Remove did nothing, except making Windows Installer think it was running an installer, preventing me from removing anything else. I had to go through Safe Mode to successfully remove it. A couple of years earlier when helping someone else, I had a similar problem with Norton Internet security, where removing Norton also removed the 'System Tools' directory in the Start Menu. tldr; Seems like the Antivirus tools are becoming viruses themselves.
That's nothing. 9 years ago my sister tried installing (college mandated) Symantec Corporate AV on top of the Symantec Home AV her gateway came preinstalled with. The install failed catastrophically leaving her with no working AV, no networking, and no working AV Uninstallers. I spent about 4 hours of quality time with regedit manually scrubbing every trace out before things started working again.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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That is my preferred method as well, and on occasion actually do a reinstall. But those pesky family photos, music downloads and videos take up more space that than I have DVDs to spare. (I guess I have to start charging them fees... damn my gerousity generosity.) < edit > :-O < / edit>
It was broke, so I fixed it.
My method (and making it well known that it's the only option I'll give has cut down heavily on begging for help from random lusers) uses a clean computer, an Ubuntu live CD, and a USB disk caddy to recover files before nuking the drive from orbit.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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Similar thing happened to my folks computer a few years ago. Brand new with the OS already installed as they are these days. No network connection, no internet, no nothing. Network adapter can't even get an IP address. The reason? Preinstalled McAfee.
I have a good one: My father-in-law, unplugged his external HD drive while copying a movie to it, it seems that the drive was running out of space (500 GB full of movies). Now the drive freezes every window PC to which it is connected. I took the disk to my office and connected it to my work PC running Archlinux, after almost a minute the disk was in a readable state and I was ready to backup the data (Please try to save my movies! he said). That happened on Monday, I'm still copying the data at a 500KB/s transfer rate, there are still 300GB pending, and I not so sure the disk can be saved. ____ichr@mm :wq
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If you thought that was bad, my brother had a McAfee trial pre-installed when he bought his laptop. When it expired, it blocked his internet connection. So, I thought, let's remove it, then. Well, no. Going to control panel, selecting McAfee Security Center (or whatever it's called) and clicking Change/Remove did nothing, except making Windows Installer think it was running an installer, preventing me from removing anything else. I had to go through Safe Mode to successfully remove it. A couple of years earlier when helping someone else, I had a similar problem with Norton Internet security, where removing Norton also removed the 'System Tools' directory in the Start Menu. tldr; Seems like the Antivirus tools are becoming viruses themselves.
Tom Lint wrote:
Seems like the Antivirus tools are becoming viruses themselves
Time was, McAfee was the best antivirus you could get. Then it got invasive and became more of a problem than a help. Next Norton. Now AVG is going there. Time to vote with my wallet again. I know somewhere there's a pattern here.. if only the antivirus writers could figure it out and fix it for me :)
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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I've gone for the "FORMAT C:" option :-D
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.
