A friend of mine asked me to look at his laptop, which runs Windows Vista Home Premium. I was an XP user, now I run Ubuntu, so my Vista experience is limited. When I first booted his laptop, I got a worm warning about Worm.Win32.Netsky(leads to definition site). So,my first order of business is to install AVG Anti-virus Free version. As AVG is installing, it tells me that an incompatible program, Ca Antivirus, is running. I promptly uninstall Ca Anti-virus and restart.
So, now I’ve restarted,I get the Windows password screen and after that, the Welcome screen. Then all I get is a black screen with the trackpad pointer on it, both in normal and safe start-up.
please help or tell me I hosed the system completely so I can let him know what’s going on.
This is why I don’t “help” people fix their virus & malware infections anymore (except my kids). Half the time you run into some heart stopping crap like this as you start to pull stuff out of the installed programs and try to install your preferred AV. Then you have to nuke the OS and restore. Lots and lots of time wasted. No friends made.
Does CTRL+ALT+DEL work to pop a task window up in the dark screen mode?
MannyL, my friend is a good guy, but he didn’t have a firewall or (acceptable) antivirus…and he was using IE instead of Firefox or Opera. There were no restore points that I could find before I started. astro, I normally don’t help, but since he was planning on wiping and reinstalling anyway, I told him I’d see what I can do to save his files first. While Vista’s task manager isn’t what I’m used to, it does show up with the three finger salute. Your link is being a big help to me so far.
I’m still open to other suggestions from anybody though.
I don’t claim to much computer knowledge, but a friend of mine once told me about knoppix http://www.knoppix.net/ which is a gnu/linux o/s that boots and runs completely from cd or dvd, and lets you access your files and make changes when windows decides to play silly buggers.
Helped me out a couple of times, sometimes to diagnose and fix a problem or to retrieve files that I wanted to save before formatting and re-installing windows.
Give it a try and see if you can do any good.
Xp/Vista usually creates restore points when it installs updates. If you can get to a run promt from the taskmanager run rstrui and see if it finds restore points
I think this is why many places that say they will repair your computer just reformat and reinstall. You don’t need much computer knowledge to pull that off.
As for your situation, the virus scanner was likely fake, and, by trying to remove, initiated something worse.
I’d suggest getting an antivirus that has a bootCD. I prefer Avira Antivir, which creates new versions multiple times a day, but you may prefer F-Secure, as it can update online after you boot it on your friend’s computer. (But if it uses obscure settings and can’t get online, that won’t be useful.)
All this said, the virus has likely done more damage than the antivirus can fix. After you run it, you can try reinstalling Windows on top of it, and then trying more conventional antivirus methods to be sure. But it’s quite likely you’ll have to backup his important files, reformat and reinstall.
Open the Vista Task Manager, click the equivalent of “New Task” in the Applications window and type in explorer.exe. If it works, this should give you access to normal operations for at least a time. If it’s a virus that is blocking explorer.exe from starting (which sounds plausible), try ending all unaccountable processes in the Task Manager before you start explorer.exe.