I am staying at a friend’s house and using her computer. Her daughter uses the computer too, and often accesses the University system. Not sure if that’s where the problem started. It has Windows 98 and she recently put msn 8 on it. Seems to have fairly up-to-date virus protection from McAfee.
It is very slow and often freezes or boots you off. Even weirder is the pop-up pornography that appears suddenly on the screen. Sometimes not for awhile, and sometimes constantly. I deleted the temp internet files, the history, the cookies. I defragged the thing. Nothing’s changed. Is it a virus? Any other ideas?
Download and run AdAware. Hit Control-Alt-Del and take a look at what’s running. Go to Run and type in Msconfig and take a look at what’s in the startup. I tell you this, cuz my parents were having a horrible time with pop ups (sometime’s they’d pop up on their own when no one was even around). Anyways I took a look around and found that they had a program running in the backround called Swimsuitnetwork. That took me about 30 mins to compleatly get rid of. Or Course they still get a lot of pop ups, but that’s to be expected, my sisters go to a lot of ad heavy websites.
You should download 2 programs that are free and will help a great deal. They are Ad-aware and Popup Hitman. Do a search for them and you should find several sites. When you run ad-aware, it scans your disk for specific type files (I don’t know exactly) and allows you to select them all and delete them. Running this program also seems to stop the unwanted e-mails. Maybe some else out there can help describe what it looks for. The Popup Hitman, when enabled actually kills pop up windows the second they appear on your screen. You can turn it on or off.
thanks, everybody! Looks like I got it. I couldn’t download Ad-Aware for some reason, but SpyBot worked. I had some hidden program called “BackWeb” or something running. Now I have one more thing I want to clean up. I did this on my computer, but can’t remember/figure out how to do it on Windows 98. How do I remove that step asking for a password to log onto Windows? My friend doesn’t use it, so you have to hit “cancel” every time. Must be some way to remove it for good.
Hm. Tried that and got a message that I typed in the wrong password. I can cancel it and it goes away, but reappears when I sign on again. Any other ideas? Thanks.
In order to make it go away, you have to know what the password for the “username” is (or any username, for that matter). Once you’ve logged in with that username, right-click on Network Neighborhood (or go to Start–>Settings–>Control Panel–>Network), left-click on properties. In the window that comes up, check the drop-down box in the middle. Change it to say “Windows Logon”. click OK. Reboot the system. Voila! No more need to enter a user/pass to logon anymore.