jtr1962
Storage? I am Storage!
Yesterday I went to my sister's for her 40th birthday. :b-day: I had heard she was having trouble with her PC being slow so while I was there I decided to do some troubleshooting, which was actually better for all involved since I avoided the people downstairs. :mrgrn: Anyway, there were something like 30 processes running :cursin: , and I immediately thought one or two things-this was either junk put in by software they had installed and/or it was adware/spyware.
I proceeded to remove items from the startup group and also from the appropriate places in the registry (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run along with a few others). Some of this stuff was put there by software but wasn't necessary for the software to run (i.e. like MS Office installs findfast plus a whole bunch of other junk processes). Other registry keys looked like adware/spyware. In addition to all this, the home page of IE was set to some ad site which loaded tons of popups, and seemed to immediately reinstall some of the junk I had cleared. Once I set IE's start page to blank, most of the junk stayed gone. However, some things persistently kept reinstalling themselves despite my best efforts, and I would end up with running processes like ve564yui plus about five or six DOS programs with names like morze5 and te5yur in the startup group and registry. I was finally able to clear most of the garbage out for good by first killing all running processes except Explorer, deleting the startup and registry items, and rebooting.
Despite my best efforts, some problems remain. When the machine boots, about 8 screens warning about invalid links (i.e. morse5.lnk not found) come up, and I can't find where in the registry or anywhere else that these links are referred to. There don't seem to be any undesired running processes any more, but the persistent warning screens don't exactly make me feel that I've done everything I should have.
In case it helps, the machine is a 900 MHz PIII with 128 MB of RAM (more RAM is on the shopping list as the machine hits the pagefile during normal use). The Internet connection is Optimum online, the OS is Windows ME (moron edition
). My niece and brother-in-law visit Kaaza and other questionable download sites frequently. I'm wondering if perhaps this is the cause of the problem, and how to prevent it in the future. Oh, I almost forget. They had McAffee anti-virus/ firewall which was mostly disabled and causing problems, so I uninstalled it. Any recommendations for good AV/firewall software? Given their browsing habits, they seem to need it.
BTW, since the responses in this thread will be directed to my sister and brother-in-law, who are less computer knowledgeable then myself, please try to explain everything a bit more in layman's terms. I'll e-mail my sister a link to this thread once it gets a few responses. Maybe I can convince her to register here so she can ask questions directly. We could use a few more female members anyway.
As an aside, the people who write spyware/adware should have their heads prominently displayed on fence posts. :evil:
I proceeded to remove items from the startup group and also from the appropriate places in the registry (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run along with a few others). Some of this stuff was put there by software but wasn't necessary for the software to run (i.e. like MS Office installs findfast plus a whole bunch of other junk processes). Other registry keys looked like adware/spyware. In addition to all this, the home page of IE was set to some ad site which loaded tons of popups, and seemed to immediately reinstall some of the junk I had cleared. Once I set IE's start page to blank, most of the junk stayed gone. However, some things persistently kept reinstalling themselves despite my best efforts, and I would end up with running processes like ve564yui plus about five or six DOS programs with names like morze5 and te5yur in the startup group and registry. I was finally able to clear most of the garbage out for good by first killing all running processes except Explorer, deleting the startup and registry items, and rebooting.
Despite my best efforts, some problems remain. When the machine boots, about 8 screens warning about invalid links (i.e. morse5.lnk not found) come up, and I can't find where in the registry or anywhere else that these links are referred to. There don't seem to be any undesired running processes any more, but the persistent warning screens don't exactly make me feel that I've done everything I should have.
In case it helps, the machine is a 900 MHz PIII with 128 MB of RAM (more RAM is on the shopping list as the machine hits the pagefile during normal use). The Internet connection is Optimum online, the OS is Windows ME (moron edition
). My niece and brother-in-law visit Kaaza and other questionable download sites frequently. I'm wondering if perhaps this is the cause of the problem, and how to prevent it in the future. Oh, I almost forget. They had McAffee anti-virus/ firewall which was mostly disabled and causing problems, so I uninstalled it. Any recommendations for good AV/firewall software? Given their browsing habits, they seem to need it.BTW, since the responses in this thread will be directed to my sister and brother-in-law, who are less computer knowledgeable then myself, please try to explain everything a bit more in layman's terms. I'll e-mail my sister a link to this thread once it gets a few responses. Maybe I can convince her to register here so she can ask questions directly. We could use a few more female members anyway.
As an aside, the people who write spyware/adware should have their heads prominently displayed on fence posts. :evil:
