Okay, this is half rant and half asking for help. My brother asked to borrow my laptop this morning, and I let him, figuring that there wasn’t much damage he could do. Oh how wrong I was. Now I know to never ever let him go near my baby again. Argh. This laptop is very important. It goes practically everywhere with me. I bring it to school so I don’t have to break my wrists trying to copy down the notes the professors are so fond of piling onto me. I use it to get me through the oh so boring classes. Now, it’s chalk full of spyware and crap because of my brother’s stupidity!
Gr. He installed the crappy file sharing program imesh and as soon as I found out, I went postal on him. It’s full of spyware and all that, and I don’t want that stuff!! I mean, I’m not exactly computer competent, but anyone dumbass should know not to install that crap!! And now I can’t remove it, and worse of all, it’s making my Internet Explorer crash over and over again. I’m just glad I have Mozilla. I don’t know what the hell is going on, but it just won’t uninstall! So, here I am angry and ranting, and hating my stupid brother for being such a dumbass. What the hell do I do to remove it? I know I can download those spyware removing programs, but my main concern right now is just to uninstall the damn program, that won’t fucking uninstall! :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:
Do a search for SpyBot and AdAware. Download, install, run. Those two programs are FREE (though SpyBot will accept donations, it won’t nag you about them) and they remove all sorts of nasty stuff.
And don’t let your brother near your computer again, unless he makes some sort of promise that he won’t download stuff, with forfeits.
Thanks Lynn, I figured I’d download/run those two as soon as I figure out how to uninstall them.
Ice Wolf, thanks for the link, but I did exactly what the link tried to show before I posted here out of frustration, and that window to uninstall just won’t load. Instead, there’s a brief flash of “preparing uninstall wizard” or something along the lines of that, and it dissapears, never to be seen again. It also, freezies the add/remove list so that if I try to click on the button again, nothing happens. :mad:
Thanks GorillaMan, but while I’m not exactly computer incompetent, I’m not computer competent either. How do I restart in safe mode? I have Windows XP.
IIRC, it’s by pressing F8 as it boots up. Just keep tapping F8, to make sure you catch it at the right time. If that doesn’t work, then do the same with left-shift. Never can remember which it is for which windows versions.
This is a very basic mode - the screen will be at a low resolution setting, none of the drivers for the modem or anything are booted, just the bare bones. Hopefully that’ll sort you out.
I restarted in safe mode and tried to uninstall from that, but it still just flashes the “preparing to uninstall wizard” then dissapears. I’m about to go bald from tearing my hair out! :mad:
On the bright side, my internet explorer stopped crashing. I think I’ve managed to remove a lot of the spyware. The damn program jsut won’t fucking uninstall! :mad:
If you have a CD burner in the laptop and know where all the install disks for your important software are, (a CD to let you reinstall Windows XP and the accompanying software should have come with your laptop) you may want to consider doing a complete reformat and reinstall someday. This is a big pain in the ass, and I wouldn’t recommend it to fix any one non-crippling problem, since you have to burn ALL the files you want to save to CD and take a few hours to format the disk, reinstall Windows, get all the correct drivers working, and get your software back. But it’ll fix anything that isn’t a hardware problem.
Thanks very much for the advice. I’ve just completed installing and running SpyBot, with results better than they could have been. Could you please confirm if AdAware if from LavaSoft? When I searched, I got returns for Ad-aware from LavaSoft.
Just as a suggestion, the next time you loan out your computer, go to the Control Panel and create a new account for the other user, and password protect your own account. There should be a way to make their account a non-administrator, so that they can’t do much in the way of damage.
When I was away for a month this summer, the laptop stayed here. Boy was I pissed off when I got home and found all sorts of crap on my computer. Turned out my little brother and his friend had decided to use it while I was gone. They downloaded all sorts of crap. Luckily, it’s all better now, although I partially blame it for some problems I had later on that meant that all of Windows had to be reinstalled. :rolleyes:
