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Author Topic: How bad can it get?  (Read 2902 times)

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Offline techie

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How bad can it get?
« on: May 14, 2008, 06:19:21 AM »
I recently finished up a laptop. I knew that it was a doomsday machine when it was booted up. Basically that was all it was capable of doing, booting up. Once booted in to the operating system, it was a slug, absolutely unable to function. This one became a project at home on spare time, not a critical system, not enough hours to sit and do it onsite.
This one was a freebie. The system had a fair amount of protection, Zonealarm Pro security suite, spyware blaster, etc. Zonealarm was a current version, updated and it failed miserably.

I guess to make a long story short, it wasn't even capable of running a hijack log.  I had to run it from Safemode, all together it took 8 different programs to clean the system up.
Numbers of 600 tracking cookies, more than 30 various trojans, after that I just gave up tracking and just kept cleaning, first scan was Malwarebytes and it took almost 6 hours to run even in safe mode.

With some serious work I was able to completely clean the system, save all of the files and produce a good and as new install system. As most here know, no one program is the solution, but with the right combinations, it can be cleaned and fixed.

I changed the security solutions and even updated it to XP SP3 without a hitch. Consider this one  :Win73:
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Offline dickw

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Re: How bad can it get?
« Reply #1 on: May 14, 2008, 07:00:09 AM »
Full marks for patience............well done.  :thumbsup:
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Offline Corrine

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Re: How bad can it get?
« Reply #2 on: May 14, 2008, 12:27:18 PM »
Ordinarily, sounds like it would have been a perfect candidate for wipe & install except that you just enjoy a challenge, Techie. 
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Offline techie

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Re: How bad can it get?
« Reply #3 on: May 14, 2008, 02:42:31 PM »
Quote from: Corrine on May 14, 2008, 12:27:18 PM
Ordinarily, sounds like it would have been a perfect candidate for wipe & install except that you just enjoy a challenge, Techie. 

I had considered wiping the system and a new install, but probably the most important thing was to be able to save the pictures and a few business documents. Actually there were some pictures of my daughter from her Junior prom that I wanted as well saved on the system, but there was no way I was going to connect to my network or there network without knowing it was clean.

The initial job was to help setup a transfer from the laptop to there new Vista desktop. It was a relatives system. This was one of those that you start a program and walk away,  go do something else. I found that there teenagers had unchecked administrator accounts, not anymore!
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Offline Clark76

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Re: How bad can it get?
« Reply #4 on: May 17, 2008, 12:02:04 AM »
I think the big lesson learned is to do regular backups, especially pictures.  A while back I had a computer crash on me and then found out my wife had never backed up all the pictures she had and there where a lot of them.  Lucky for her it was the mother board that had died so I was still able to slave the hard drive and get the pictures off it.  Lesson learned...
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Offline techie

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Re: How bad can it get?
« Reply #5 on: May 19, 2008, 08:19:14 PM »
I have always preferred to run a separate partition or second hard drive for data files, pictures, documents, etc. In case of a system failure unless it is a hard drive, on a system repair or total operating system reload, the data partition is not affected and all saved files are still available.   
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