My laptop's being retarded: help needed

You have a virus
im no computer geek
but the longer you leave it on that screen the more it corrupts your drives
I had one a while back i got emailed and clicked thinking it was a mates email.
It corrupts your back up files so that when you clear your drives its still there in you back up drives (which if you delete them too you have a broken computer)
Take it the computer shop in woodhouse by the barbers near hyde park corner
They fixed mine good
It may not be a virus
but if it is
it sucks

How much do they charge?

If you get the problem fixed, get Avast's free antivirus software, better than that AVG crap at warning you about viruses and shit

I think I've found the prolem.

Also, for advise you'll need to report hardware and software specs.

One solution, create a boot disk from someone else's computer.
Start with the boot disk
run any diagnostic programs you have on the disk to isolate the problem
or reinstall windows

further to steve's advice, I'd get spybot search and destroy, it's an excellent program that drezha (chris ) linked me to when I had spyware problems, it warns before any registry changes (something you may have fallen foul to) ^^

Sorry to hear about this problem ><

Get someone to rip the hard drive out of your laptop and virus scan it from another computer.

Or

Get someone to put an ubuntu live cd in you laptop, use that to copy all your important stuff else where and reinstall. Ideally elsewhere is a USB hard drive that you can then scan and grab stuff back off of once you've done the reinstall, otherwsie find a brave friend with decent AV software and recover stuff via windows file sharing, or someone with a Mac or a Linux box.

I recommend Kaspersky's antivirus, it's fairly awesome to the point of me feedinging it to my mother's laptop. AVG is about as good as Norton (whose main customer base comes from them paying manufacturers to ship limited trials with new hardware.......), it's safe to say I don't rate Norton. Avast is ok, but I woudn't trust it with my uni work... IIRC Information Systems Services hands out McAffee corporate which can be ok, and is probably better than any of the free stuff.

I think the services of Little Dave may be available, if so he will expect to be compensated for his time.

I can probalbly have it fixed in an evening, and could probably be persuaded to come to leeds and my services are available at national minimum wage + train fair from doncaster.

If you're really stuck, the place in hyde park corner's pretty good to the point where I've let the guy who runs the place inside of the PC disability services bought for me.

Knock on my door sometime tomorrow evening. I'll take a look at it for you. You running XP or vista? Coz that's no XP boot sequence.

Joelxxx

I took it to the place on Hyde Park corner on Friday and it should hopefully be fixed by this afternoon. The guy said he's dealt with this sort of thing quite a few times before and shouldn't be too difficult to deal with. It's likely to cost about £50, but what you gonna do?

It's vista btw Joel (XP never gave me this grief!)

Thanks everyone for your advice; if you've suggested AV software, would you mind posting/sending me the link for it? Thanks

From those mentioned:

Anti-Virus
AVG: http://free.grisoft.com/
Avast: http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html
Kaspersky Online Scanner: http://www.kaspersky.co.uk/virusscanner

I couldn't find a free version of Kaspersky to download so you may have to pay for that. I have used the online scanner though and it's very good.

Anti-Spyware (I find more errors are spyware than viruses on computers I look at)
Spybot Search & Destroy: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html
Adaware: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/products/ad_aware_free.php

That's all I can think of, but they should do the trick

Zonealarm is a decent free firewall

£50!!! I used to charge people about £15 for that sort of thing when I did it as a job...

Joelxxx

I have AVG and Zonealarm already, but I'll look into the others, thanks

That's cheap for getting things done somewhere proper.

For the record, Vista is a lot more secure than XP, especially in the configuration shipped to home users. The default in XP is to run every program with administrative privileges, which is just plain stupid. Of course there's a tide of fucktards who are rebelling against the new security model. I don't particularly like Vista, but I use it for Gaming because XP crashes Oblivion and Fallout 3 on me far too often.

I've seen Zone Alarm cause a crapload of problems when moving between different network environments, in particular steal mode does weird things to everyone on some on friendly LANs. For most purposes the built in interface to the vista firewall is adequate, as I understand it other firewalls like Zone Alarm, and offerings by the likes of McAffee, Norton and Kaspersky are improved user interfaces to the mechanisms built into the Windows network stack.

Trial Versions of Kaspersky are available from http://www.kaspersky.co.uk/trials

ISS provide a McAffee licence for all staff and students. It's the corporate version not the annoying home version.
http://iss.leeds.ac.uk/info/264/viruses/327/viruses/3

Oh my god. What is it with the UI's on modern antivirus. They've all switched to painfully attractive, yet horrifically useless XML interfaces, which prevent you from doing anything at any level other than "newb with an axe in head" yes I want program x to access internet.

Joelxxx

Zonealarm annoys me a lot in that respect. "X is trying to access the internet". Yes I know it is, I just told it to do that!

That's why it's good. It checks that you actually want stuff to connect. I don't want a firewall which assumes. It's somewhat defeatist.

I use bitdefender these days which has it's own packet filtering driver, so it extends basic windows capabilities, rather than just using them and relying on their security, which is infamously poor.

Joelxxx

ipcop FTW