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Otherwise try Adaware and Spybot, use the free version. In the past, these programs were all you needed, but seems not to be the case anymore. The spyware that circulates now behaves more like a virus if you ask me. It is extremely hard to get off your computer if it is the worst kind. Wiping the hard drive clean and stop wasting time fixing it is often the best route.
Good luck.
The top programs seem to be Windows Defender, Ad-Aware, and Spybot Search & Destroy. But as for me, I suspect I'm screwed.
It even pops up constant messages and disables access to the Task Manager when I boot into Safe Mode.
Ouch!
Like I was saying, these have morphed into the virus catagory because these things render your computer useless.
Which leads to the question, what the heck is the motive? Just to destroy your machine?
If you acutally buy their product, either that's a further scam or you successfully remove the spyware from your held-hostage PC, I'm not sure which.
Or else re-instal the OS.
It constantly pops up fake "your computer is infected with spyware messages"
It constantly pops up fake "your computer is infected with spyware messages"
Just think about the amount of non web savvy / new web people that fall for this I bet they make tons from this rubbish. Darn them all!
Could McAfee AntiSpyware [mcafee.com] be an overkill for the task?
[edited by: Habtom at 2:32 pm (utc) on Feb. 12, 2008]
I downloaded the free version and plan to buy one of theirs when I decide which one. They all sound good and don't cost an arm and a leg.
Ann
Here is the url to it. I hope this is allowed as I am not associated with the site:
[emsisoft.com...]
Because I have been searching for a solution to this problem for a while now to keep in my arsenal.
Then run all of the usual programs - Adaware, Spybot, your own virus scanner, etc. Download the antispyware from a clean machine to a CD then upload it from the CD to the infected computer.
If that doesn't get rid of everything then Google every process that is running that you aren't sure what it is. Be sure to use a different machine to Google the process names in case the malware has taken over your Google results or blocked the antivirus sites, which does happen. Look for advice in the established antivirus forums as sometimes there will be more malware sites in the search results.
I just switched from Norton to AVG, based on the advice of many people here at WebmasterWorld, and the AVG antivirus scan program caught a couple of nasty things on my PC that Norton had not detected.
We clean up PCs for our neighbors and sometimes our kids' PC all of the time and usually somebody, somewhere has found a fix for every virus, Trojan and spyware known to man and posted it in one of the antivirus forums. So far we have a hundred percent success rate using this methodology, though it is time consuming and sometimes you have to do things like manually edit the registry entries.
[edited by: Jane_Doe at 7:27 pm (utc) on Feb. 14, 2008]
I started searching for a good on line one, found this and those two trojans are history plus all the extra bad stuff that had got into the registry...I never let it go too long and usually find someway to clean it fast when things start going wrong.
I use Ad-Aware and TrojanHunter in combination with other hardware measures.
I've also found files on my system (old .exe's) which I thought were safe and with updated definitions over time, some of them proved to be unsafe.
The mess was taking over the off line comp when I was trying to work I had to sometimes open an app a couple of times as it would promptly close itself....memory being used up and having to restart by unplugging the computer in order to regain some measure of contrl, etc.
Computer is working clean and smooth today....did I say I just did this yesterday? Feels good to breathe a sigh of relief.
Make sure that you get "spybot" and not spywarebot, aswell as "Adaware" and not adware
specifically:
spybot - search & destroy
lavasoft ad-aware
