I’m about at my wit’s end. My computer has slowed down to an absolute crawl, and I can’t for the life of me figure out whose hand is on the broomstick shoved up my digital heinie. :mad:
Computer applications and internet speed are basically nearly nil. I keep getting popups after IE shutdown, and they appear to be coming from atoque.com. However, Spybot Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware 6.0 are absolutely no help whatsoever, and my computer speed is getting worse and worse. I need to kill this thing and soon.
Any help is appreciated, technophiles!
Usually, I’d suggest you run hijackthis and post the log at http://www.spywareinfo.com, but spywareinfo is under a DDoS attack right now (by a spyware company, no doubt) and can’t be reached. However, the hijackthis log should give clues as to what the problem is.
If you want to do it yourself, download hijackthis and save the log. Print it out. Now, go through it line by line, paying especial attention to the “08 HKLM” entries. Go to Sysinfo and enter the name of the program on any of those entries.
Once you’ve identified the spyware, then run Hijackthis again, check the items, and then click on “Fix Checked.” Reboot and delete the files from your computer.
Or, if you like, you can e-mail me the log and I’ll take a look.
Additional info:
The line in the Hijackthis log that is causing trouble is this one:
O4 - HKLM…\Run: [etups] C:\WINNT\system32\etups.exe
Run Hijackthis, check the box next to this entry, and then select “fix checked.”
Restart the computer, do a search for etups.exe and delete the file.
What system are you running? Windows XP?
Here are some things you can do first before thinking it is spyware.
There are basic maitenance every computer user should do.
Run Disk Defragmenter.
Make sure you don’t have huge files on the desktop. Always place files on a drive and create a shortcut to that file on your desktop.
Go into C:\Documents and Settings[username]\Local Settings\Temp
delete all the files in there. You might have to turn off the hide files and folders option.
Go into C:\Windows\Prefetch and delete all those files
Go into C:\Windows\TEmp and delete all those files
Go to C:\Documents and Settings and right click on your username(name)… and select properties. Make sure that the folder size is smaller than 100mb… the smaller the better.
That means, move all My Pictures, My Music files elsewhere.
You can also speed up the computer a bit by turning off the indexing feature. Right click on the C: drive and properties. Deselect the indexing feature.
Try those and see if that helps first.
My post was regarding the slowness of applications and internet…
And please reduce the Internet Cache size especially if you have high speed.
Open Internet Explorer.
Go into Tools > Internet Options
Click on Settings and change the size of disk space used to something reasonable like 10MB or 25MB…
Clear the temp files and check offline files to delete everything.