Posted on 07/11/2008 12:05:44 PM PDT by yankeedame
In my little house we have an HP desktop and an ARCHOS 605 wifi (amongh other things) and for the longest time they worked perfectly together.
Then one day they were no longer on speaking terms.
Though each by itself worked out-- and checked out-- AOK.
So, after some very careful investigation -- and a $$ an hour computer guy -- the problem almost certainly is a virus, or what have you.
So, can anyone recommand a good de-bugging program? We just have the plain-vanilla AOL virus protection (quit snickering) and so...well...any recommandations?
Thanks
I got a bad virus sometime back, couldn’t get rid of it so we used DBAN and wiped out the whole thing and started over.
To really be sure, it is best to back up your data and start fresh. Personally (and professionally), I prefer Trend Micro’s products (antivirus.com). They have an online checker as well.
http://www.malwarebytes.org/products.php
Download the Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware scanner from the above link. Run a scan and remove all malicious softwares found.
Then install Spybot Search and Destroy, and run a scan.
These two are two of the best cleaning utilites out there.
Avast is pretty good, guards against the usual malware and also rootkits, which other free antivirus utilities generally don’t. http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html
But your problem may be related to last week’s Windows Update, which had compatibility problems with some firewalls (including the very popular ZoneAlarm) which cut off internet access on afflicted machines. If you use ZoneAlarm (or if AOL’s utility has a firewall), try reducing your firewall setting to “medium”. That might bring back your internet connection.
Ditto on the AVG.
Totally non-intrusive, very lightweight and highly effective.
Not to mention FREE!
http://free.avg.com/ww.download-avg-anti-virus-free-edition
You’ll also want to get Ad-Aware 2008 to purge all spy/adware from your system:
http://lavasoft.com/products/ad_aware_free.php
I'm with you on the effectiveness, but not the other two adjectives.....ever since I installed the new version a couple of months ago, I've noticed that the daily scan takes three hours - and during this period my computer runs as if I'm on dialup again.
One thing viruses like to do, is to disable any attempt to load AV software. So before you install one of those, you should probably run something like Stinger, which is McAfee's free offering that catches most common viruses.
Is your workstation setup as a DHCP client? What happens when you configure a static IP? Are you able to ping that router? Are you able to ping different hosts on your wlan? What happens when you manually flush the dns resolver cache, or manually force a dhcp renewal?
c:\>ipconfig /flushdns
c:\>ipconfig /release
c:\>ipconfig /renew
If you are using AVG 8.0 try turning off the link scanner and the email scanner and see if that speeds up the scan. There has been a problem reported with 8.0 that is supposed to be fixed with the next update.
You probably need more than one since all have their quirks and oversights. You’ll get lots of standard suggestions.
One that I use is Threatfire, because it resides in your computer and stops malware from installing itself. Most anti-virus programs have to wait until the malware is identified as a threat, do the software engineering to meet the problem, and then download to your machine. This can obviously take some time.
Well, that's not quite true. You need to find out if you actually have a malware intrusion. So you'll want to try several of the malware detection products listed in the above threads.
But if you do find a virus, you need to wipe your disk, reinstall the OS and apps from read-only media and then restore your data from your last known good backup.
Once you've become infected with malware you can never be sure that you've found everything that it touched. The only way to be sure that you've actually gotten rid of it is to slick and restore.
That's industry best practice, regardless of what the sales types at Norton will tell you.
An Archos 605 is a portable media player that connects over Wifi, not a router. It sounds like the computer can no longer connect to the media player.
Honestly, this sounds like a firewall issue, not a virus. The player probably got a new IP address that is blocked by the firewall.
Can the player connect over a USB connection?
If you are not an expert, I recommend blowing away the system and starting over. Viruses are much smarter now and can hide themselves.
Buy some imaging software, reformat, reinstall software, image your machine and never worry about another virus, trojan, etc killing your machine...
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