I know this isn’t a tech support forum but I’m sure someone here can help me out. Like an idiot, last night on my computer I clicked “NEW PICS FROM THE BEACH” in a friend of mine’s AOL Instant Messager info. Next thing I knew, it was in my info too, and my Norton Antivirus popped up sporadically with “quarantined” files displayed. Shortly thereafter I couldn’t get onto Internet Explorer (gave me a page not found all the time) and couldn’t access AOL Instant Messager either. I’m typing this from another computer, by the way.
Sometimes I’ll restart my computer and get online and the internet will work for a minute or two; then the Page Not Found will begin and it won’t work anymore. Therefore I know it’s not a problem with the cables. I ran Spybot Search and Destroy AND Norton Antivirus and neither has gotten rid of the problem. What should I do?
Sometimes you have to reformat the computer. Those cursed IM Viruses that are going around. Programmers have to make programs that are resistant to these things.
Right now, Norton is a little behind McAffee, and Trend Micro as far as protection is concerned. Norton is a good company, and I think they will rectify thier shortcomings soon. Make sure that your anti-virus patterns are up to date and scan again. Norton ought to be able to clean your system. If not, go to Trend Micro’s webpage, and try thier free online service called housecall.
Beyond that, sometimes you just have to reformat the computer. Hope you made good backups.
There is one program that you did not mention and that is Ad-Aware . It is a free program that will scan your machine for adware\malware. It won’t work very well for a virus though. If you run it make sure that you do it in Safe Mode. You can also do an online virus scan at Trend Micro or at Panda if you can stay on that long. What OS are you using?
I’m not a computer expert but when this happened to me a couple of days ago I was told to turn off my firewall by tech support as that could be cutting me off from the internet. I did, and I got back online but that just made the trojan horse and other viruses I had even worse. So what I had to do was do an online antivirus scan (at one of those websites that scans and repairs online instead of you downloading a program and running it since I couldn’t download antivirus software at the time) then I did a system restore then I downloaded an antivirus program (AVG) to prevent it from happening again.
After the frame where you indicate which of your drives you wish to scan, is it normal to end up staring at a blank white page for quite some time? (NOTE: “quite some time”, in my case, is within the context of VirtualPC on a less-than-blistering-fast 500MHz Mac. Let’s assume that if a blank white screen is normal, I’m going to be seeing it a lot longer than you would.)
A progress bar or some text (“Now scanning your drives. Please be patient”) would be nice.