The Dink Network

Wow, my mom's office computer is just... wow. It had half a dozen adware utilities and i found something called "cumslide" when i went into control panel to remove some stuff. It was like the computer was forced on its knees and raped through the modem. You can't do any thing on it any longer with out getting a swarm up popups, or it freezing. I tried running a norton scan after i killed off the adware and tried to uninstall cumslide (probably a bad idea), and it froze before giving me the blue screen of death(tm). I did manage to see that a scan hadn't been run for over two months!

Blue Screen of Death is a copy right owned by the microsoft corporation. Any likeness to it in a opperating system will surely cause your untimely demise. The blue screen of "Bill fudgeed Your PC(tm)" is also a trade mark of the microsoft corporation. You may not reproduce any likeness of High Executive Gates preforming sexual acts on your computer in a way that demeans your computer. You nay not reproduce any images of Gates taking your money and masturbating in your wallet

2 months? that's not even much. I haven't scanned my computer in over 3 months and I don't even have an antivirus program right now. And as long as everything works fine, I'm not gonna get one either...

As an intermittant IT guy, I have to deal with this stuff all the time. Unfortunately, there are few solutions to fixing computers riddled with adware and spyware that do not involve a long and ardous process of eliminating almost every last piece of malicious code. Your best bet is to get another computer from your workplace, have the tech guys (or you, if you're the tech guy) set it up for you. Then transfer only your important files, like documents and spreadsheets, from your "adwared" hard-drive to your new computer. If you can't network, you can take out your old hard drive and set it as a slave drive in your new computer. You can then grab the files that way. Every instance of Adware I've seen has to actually be installed and in the registry in order to work, so you shouldn't have to worry about it popping up again by simply having the old drive slaved.

However, if you have a virus... then you should get your drive cleaned of it before doing any of that. If it can't be cleaned, then you'll probably have to kiss it goodbye as it gets reformatted. I seriously doubt the IT guys will want to spend the time working on it.

In the future, try to avoid grabbing cute, free programs like cursors or screen savers, especially if the free stuff was advertized in banner ads. Even things like WeatherBug have been reported to contain spyware. There are often statements buried in the license agreement in these programs that state in cryptic legalese that you're basically giving them permission to install all these extra ad programs onto your computer. And once they are there, they can be extremely difficult to remove, as you already know.

Also, keep a program like Adaware or Spybot Search & Destroy installed on the computer. They will help block and destroy adware before it becomes a problem.

I actually dont download any of that kind of crapware and stay pretty cautious on my mom's office computers. I don't know where they got it from, but they also had non-adware, non-spyware, software that was comlpete junk, and was never used by them. For example, the had an advanced sound effects manager one day. It didn't come with the computer or any new hardware they got for it. All it did was allow you to change the reverbiration, echo and distortion of sounds heard through the speakers. Why the hell would I want every sound on my computer to have a echo or have one of the other sound scemes that applied to every sound?

I think my mom's assistant downloaded some crap. She's sweet, but not too bright. Kinda slow actually. I guess I'll check out the history to see where she and my mom have been.

I think they are just planing on getting a new computer since its not really worth it to work on this one. They said i could probably have it if they get rid of it. Maybe I'll start collecting crap computers and selling them, for parts. Or better yet, net work a dozen or so and use their combined processing power. Mwahahahahah!

Uh oh I got Weather Bug when I updated AIM and I did notice my internet connection would only work if I went through the modem and told it to dial...not if I opened up Explorer or Outlook Express. I got the rid of it after that.

Sincerely,
The Vault Dweller

Hmm... interesting, it could have been installed along with another piece of software. I know a person where I work had CD that installed burning software along with a bunch of other useless crap if you're not paying attention to what's actually being installed. It even installed an old trial version of Norton over the new one, rendering both unusuable.

About the assistant, I don't want to blame anyone, but it's likely. The people that know just enough about computers to cause real damage, but not enough to know what they're actually doing are the most dangerous.

It's pretty unlikely they'll give the computer to you, as the hardware itself is likely just fine. It's the software that's screwed up, the computer can be easily made usuable again with a reformat.

Yeah, but i still don't think that they would go through the trouble

Wow, and toss a computer that's perfectly fine otherwise? That doesn't sound quite right.

If you can't install Ad-aware, try burning Ad-aware ( complete with reflist.ref )onto a CD, and try scanning your computer from cd rom. I'm not sure if Ad aware can run that way, but I have run other utilities from cd.

Hmmm.... I don't think the Doctors would trust me fixing their computer if it included reformating the hard drive. I've never actually nuked the hard drive and re-installed an opperating system. Plus, they're working with Windows 98. If anything ever happened they'd blame it on me. I'd rather just let them throw away a perfectly good computer and take it. I am so evil.