Kilauea

Hi,

My friend had a problem of virus, I got to her house, figured she had no firewall, antivirus or spyware protection. Her computer was going at an utterly slow speed(compared to mine) even tho she has the same processor (P4 1.7Ghz) and RAM (768mb) as I do.

I proceeded to download Kaspersky antivirus trial... Everything worked well, until I restarted, then it was taking ages(read more than 30minutes) to open up, I got tired of waiting and I restarted, so I restarted in safe mode and after 5 minutes of the same slow opening, I got tired, booted in regular and hit ctrl-alt-del, cleared away all the unknown or unneeded process and it booted alright, not good, just alright. I then scaned with it, found 48 infected files that all got delt with. Then I got Spybot(cleared the starting program list limiting it to the needed ones I knew of), ran it and found 61 spywares which have all been dealt with(except maybe one which needed computer restart to be dealt with for the reason said afterwards). On restart, it was still utterly slow, so I cleared away and Spybot never ran, didn't made a big fuss over that. I just ran defrag since she had no clue what that was, I assume it had been years.

So here we are, I started the defrag, then had to leave... apparently her father shut her computer in the process of defrag and now she says(haven't seen it yet) that the computer just freezes on startup.

Before I go back there and try to defrag again, is there anything that could explain that or anything anyone might advise me to do ?

Also, once defragmented, her computer should be of comparable speed as mine ?

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5½ years old rig ?
P4 1.7Ghz
MSI MS-6547E
768mb RAM
ATI Radeon 7200
40Gb Seagate HDD w/ Xp
7Gb Maxtor HDD w/ Linux
TigerPlus 300 Watt PSU (never heard of such company)
Broken LG CD-rom drive that seems to work sometimes

Kilauea

Also, I believe that despite all of this, there is 1 virus/spyware problem that remains. It will log her off MSN for a few seconds, sends off a link to a contest site thing and then she's back on.

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5½ years old rig ?
P4 1.7Ghz
MSI MS-6547E
768mb RAM
ATI Radeon 7200
40Gb Seagate HDD w/ Xp
7Gb Maxtor HDD w/ Linux
TigerPlus 300 Watt PSU (never heard of such company)
Broken LG CD-rom drive that seems to work sometimes

imsati

Depending on the level of infection and what she has stored as far as personal files, it may be easier/quicker to just reinstall Windows, if that's an option. You mentioned she never Defragged, but did she keep disk or CD backups of any of her files? If so, great; if not, might be worth the 15 minutes doing so so she can start fresh.

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--Jay
Gigabyte EP31-DS3L | E4500 | Masscool HSF paired with AS-5
Dual 81920 MB SATA | e-GeForce 7100 GS | CM Elite 330 (gorgeous!)
Triple Boot: Ubuntu 7.10/XP Home/Kubuntu 7.10

oscaryu1

When defragging, when I shut it down for a test once, in the middle of a defragment, it "deleted" the file. It crashed it in otherwords, most likely, it was a system file, thus it will freeze and cannot startup...

Lesson learned. Don't mess with the Defragger.

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