Posts by Mastadex

This is one of the most annoying infections yet. It took me almost 30 minutes to remove.

Here is the easiest way to remove it. What you will need:

Antivirus (norton, or Mcaffe)
MS antispyware
Adaware
HijackThis.

First, the most crucial part of this is to stop the service running the spyware. To do this, click the start menu, click RUN. type in services.msc this is the service manager for windows. There shoudl be one service there called svchost.exe. Right click on it and select properties. Stop the service, and from the drop down menu select disable.

This stops the spyware from reappearing after reboot etc.

Next Run Ad-aware and MS antispyware. whatever they find, remove it. After both scans are done, run the softwares agian to make sure. Once thats done, run your anti-virus, and remove all viruses it finds.

Open up hijackthis and take a look through the listings. Now i dont exactly remember what listings are the ones you remove, there were almost a dozen when i went thru it. Your best bet is to post the hijackthis log here for people to look at it.

Delete this file also: c:\windows\desktop.html

that should get rid of that pesky desktop.

also look through those links above, they are useful (wish i looked at them before i went gunho on the spyware)

check out http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm for the list of services that can be disabled in your system for a faster Windows XP

I believe i post this somewhere too, but anyway, http://tweakxp.com/ has lots of tweaks and tips on how to make windows run faster too. For example how to load all system files into RAM (only if you have enough memory) and make windows fly.

An article I read not too long ago about SP2 and its encounters with dell computers. Here is the link:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/windows/0,39020396,39165428,00.htm

For those that don't really want to read it, its basically telss you how people with dell computers (mainly laptops) have had performance decreases. I have noticed on my computer too, it being at 2.8Ghz (800FSB, 1MB L2 Cache) was running alower then my PII 450Mhz.

Another great resource is slashdot, they have user posted comments about the current article, aswell as more info on it. here is the link:

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/03/1842252&tid=201&tid=128

Hopefully this is of some assistance to some.

mySQL can bedownloaded from thier site. I believe 4.0 is the newest stable version?? you can download it from: http://dev.mysql.com/

Installing it should be easy and make sure you have administrator privilages if you want to install the services.

Try using a third party graphics tool such as photoshop, paintshop pro or possibly MS paint.

It sounds like a font problem. if you can change your apperance to use a different font that might help it.

does the text look something like this: ?

this means either a font is missing or corrupted or has been switched to a font that does not have the regular character set. one way to fix this is to change the font face, another is to reinstall the font your using now.

I have several 3Com cards and they all work fine. there could be a driver conflict on your machine,. I suggest getting the latest drivers. If that doesnt wrk, then you might have one of several problems. the card is damaged, the OS is corrupted to the point where it cant read drivers correctly (very possible), or the OS doesnt support the card (also very possible).

I agree totally. Im running SP2 right now and ive noticed some serious problems. but being a computer hacker, I disabled most of the services that SP2 employs and im safe for now until i format agian. But there are some serious faults in SP2. one being that it uses your CPU less efficiently, possibly a conflict between services? another this is that bandwith is severely limited. Im on a 5Mbit line at home and the most I can get now is around 1.5Mbit. The firewall is a joke, and its possibly less secure then in previous versions. The only thing thats kinda good that came out of this is the pop up blocker for IE. Although i dont use it, i bet there are people out there thatcan breath a sigh of relief.

Thos are some of the problems I have been having. Amongst countless others, that would take me too long to mention. Im still not done disecting SP2, but I would caution all of you to NOT download SP2 until it has been upgraded a little bit.

Are you getting a little window saying its going to restart or is it just hard rebooting by tiself without anything special/different appearing on the screen. Some viruses restart your computer like the sasser or blaster variations.

You can always try nuking and reinstalling everything, but thats not always the case. If you have system restore enabled then you can tryt tunning that and restoring your OS to a previous date. This might be a serious problem if your logging in as administrator because if admin is screwd up then your whole computer is corrupted.

And dont install SP2! haha.

Seriously. So far from what ive seen and tested, your computer is better of with no service packs or with SP1 at most.

You also forgot to mention: cleaning up temp files every week or so, cleaning the registry, removing unwanted/unused programs, and defragging.

Note:

The PRC service was responsible for the blaster worm. Even though its fixed, i believe that its a horrible piece of software to implement in an operating system. Hasn't Microsoft heard of moore's law??

...Or use a browser that is far more secure then IE. such as Opera or Mozilla which both have resume capable transfer engines.

Norton uses alot of disk time. but there isnt really much you can do for that. There could be alot of unwanted programs or services that are loading when you first boot up. I would suggest defragging your HDD, this might give you a small performance jump. another thing is to get rid of unwanted systems services and programs that boot up with your comp.

Does it take longer booting up while its displaying the windows 2000 logo or when you see the graphical windows??

Most of the newer motherboard have an option in the BIOS which allows you to increase and decrease the AGP apareture size. What this option does is lets the graphics card borrow some of your RAM when it runs out of its video memory. ususally the optimum level is half your RAM size but 128Mb is ususally sufficient.

On some older video cards, this may give a large boost.

If your computer freezes or crashes, then reset this setting to default. Some video cards have problems with too much memory.

Nice. But I believe its easier to remove the QOS protocol from the network stack when installing XP.

What are your computer stats? and if you know what motherboard you have, then the motherboard manufacturer ususally has a untility that lets you monitor system values like cpu temperature, fan speed, voltage etc.