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laptop/virus trouble
bowtiedseal
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
My roommate's four year old IBM thinkpad has been acting up lately - she's planning on taking it to the campus computer help desk but in the meantime we're wondering if she can do anything herself. She has McAfee installed and has run several full scans.
It started with a message coming up randomly saying "This system is shutting down. Please sae all work in progress and log off. Any unsaved changes will be lost. This shutdown was initiated by NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM. Message: Windwos must now restart because the DCOM Server Process Launcher service terminated unexpectedly."
She also says when she force quits it goes to the blue screen saying logging off and shutting off instead of the black screen it has gone to in the past. Also she gets this message or some variation on it, in red italics, on every page she opens in Firefox: "Warning! Your system is in danger. YOUR COMPUTER IS IN need of full scanning." If clicked on it leads us to antivirusxpro2009.com which attempts to sell some program. McAfee hasn't noticed anything amiss in the scans she's run but this is obviously out of the ordinary.
Any help is appreciated, we are not the most tech-savvy.
It started with a message coming up randomly saying "This system is shutting down. Please sae all work in progress and log off. Any unsaved changes will be lost. This shutdown was initiated by NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM. Message: Windwos must now restart because the DCOM Server Process Launcher service terminated unexpectedly."
She also says when she force quits it goes to the blue screen saying logging off and shutting off instead of the black screen it has gone to in the past. Also she gets this message or some variation on it, in red italics, on every page she opens in Firefox: "Warning! Your system is in danger. YOUR COMPUTER IS IN need of full scanning." If clicked on it leads us to antivirusxpro2009.com which attempts to sell some program. McAfee hasn't noticed anything amiss in the scans she's run but this is obviously out of the ordinary.
Any help is appreciated, we are not the most tech-savvy.
bowtiedseal on
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If you haven't been paying McAfee every year for updated virus definitions (which, btw, is totally not worth it, there are much better free anti-virus programs), then it's probably years out of date and is useless. Ditch it and go for something like AVG, Avast, NOD32, etc.
My best advice is to just take it in, have them try to boot from a rescue disk if possible, and if not, well, they'll have no choice but to nuke it from orbit and start fresh-with a clean install and a decent antiviral.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
Limed for the rockin' truth
And McAfee is probably one of the worst on the market. I personally don't recommend AVG or Avast, or really any of the free ones, but thats my preference, I've just not seem the work well. If you're willing to spend the money, I'd go with Kaspersky or Spysweeper with Anti-virus (Small name, but shit I've seen that work some magic)