Computer virus – McAfee took my money and did not help. Now what?

Be sure to watch out for the Trojan, "Spyware Protect 2009". It's nasty. You'll get a pop up that says it has detected a virus. First of all don't accept anything. I never clicked on anything, nor accepted anything, but it was too late. When you get the pop up, it's on your computer. It won't let you run any of your protection programs.

I had to have one of my employees send me a help sheet , printed from my other computer, that gave you step by step how to get rid of it.
 
Listen to the Turtle.
PC's are so stone age. And contrary what some pin heads are saying, for the last 7 years there have been NO viruses.
 
notice that all of these are written or quoted by "anti-virus" companies. conflict of interest and zero basis.
 
comsnark said:
.......What was the problem?......
Click to expand...

I had a virus. This virus also did damage McAfee. Per the technician, McAfee is aware of this virus and is working on a fix. I did ask the technician for the name of the virus and he did answer me but I could not understand him. I did ask where he was in the world and he said India.
Guys, please don’t take this as racist, it’s not meant to be. I could hardly communicate with the technician. He helped me and fixed my problem and I am very thankful. It’s just that my Midwestern American English was so very different than his English. I could understand about half the words he said. It was a real struggle to try to make sense out of his sentences.
I wish at the end they would send you an email with a report of some sort. They don’t.

comsnark said:
Did you really need to buy the new laptop, or was this an excuse to upgrade?
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In hind sight, nope, I did not need it.

At the time I did not care about the cost of the new laptop. The laptop and programs could be replaced by money.

It was the data that had me in full panic mode.

I have an external hard drive and back up about 1x/month. I know, not often enough, but that’s what I do.

After this experience I’d like to find a service that backs up my data files including Outlook to some remote secure server automatically and it does it over the internet and only needs to sync the changes, not every file after the first initial set-up. If anyone has recommendations please let me know.
 
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Also, after you've done a backup, make sure you can restore from that backup. I recently had a friend try to restore her files, and found that they weren't there. She has since fixed this. But, I've also seen this elsewhere. You need to verify your backups are good, and the best way to do that, is to try and do a restore of some of the files. Sounds simple and logical and many are probably saying "Doh!" But, many folks don't do the test piece.

-VtSeaRay
 
VTSeaRay said:
Also, after you've done a backup, make sure you can restore from that backup. I recently had a friend try to restore her files, and found that they weren't there. She has since fixed this. But, I've also seen this elsewhere. You need to verify your backups are good, and the best way to do that, is to try and do a restore of some of the files. Sounds simple and logical and many are probably saying "Doh!" But, many folks don't do the test piece.

-VtSeaRay
Click to expand...


I can relate to this.

I keep an incredible amount of information in Outlook.

I made the mistake of thinking I was backing up my Outlook data. I would copy the PST file to my external hard drive.

After buying a new laptop a previous time I then copied this PST file to the new laptop. It did not work as was of no use.

After this I found out you need to export your PST to a backup.pst file, copy this file to the external hard drive, then copy it to the new laptop , rename the file then import this renamed PSTfile into the new laptops outlook program. Finally you can delete this renamed .PST file. Reboot and confirm all is OK by spot checking a few contacts, appointment, emails, etc.

Even with my new laptop with its smoking fast 2 duo CPU P9500’s at 2.53ghz processors, 4 GIGS of ram, my PST file took about 6 hours to import.

Your advice is right on.
 
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For backup, I use FileBack PC. It costs about $25. I believe it has a 14 day trial.

This program will do an incremental backup. You can set it up different jobs to only backup certain things. It will also preserve older versions of files. It can be set to run at specific times (although I don't use it that way).

Most importantly (in my view) is that the files it creates on your backup drive are readable as normal files. I believe (need to confirm) that this actually works both ways. . that is, if you modify your backup file, it will also backup that changed file onto your PC. Nice if you have a music library on both an external drive and a home PC.

Personally, I would not backup a PC to some random location on the internet. I like to OWN my backups :).

I backup to a USB drive, because I have too much data for a reasonable number of DVD's. (and way, way too much to upload over the internet). When feeling particularly paranoid, I put the backup USB drive in a different location (i.e. if the house burns down, I am fine). NEVER, NEVER leave the backup drive attached to the PC as a habit. Lightning strikes would be a common mode failure for both the PC and the external drive.

In addition to my "full backup", I have a "working copy" of my personal files on a second drive. This second drive is for when I travel and use my Work Laptop. I don't consider this a proper backup, because of the number of times it gets XRay'd in airports. (This way, if I need to look something up, I generally have the data with me. I normally sync my iPod to my home PC. If my iPod dies on the road, I can buy a new iPod and use the second drive to load on all my music).

Outlook PST's: I get paranoid when PST's exceed 500mb. Too many eggs in one basket. I currently generate about 5 x 500mb PST's per year. Don't forget the *.OST file in the Applications\data directory.

Hope this helps.
 
Presentation said:
I made the mistake of thinking I was backing up my Outlook data. I would copy the PST file to my external hard drive.

After buying a new laptop a previous time I then copied this PST file to the new laptop. It did not work as was of no use.

After this I found out you need to export your PST to a backup.pst file, copy this file to the external hard drive, then copy it to the new laptop , rename the file then import this renamed PSTfile into the new laptops outlook program. Finally you can delete this renamed .PST file. Reboot and confirm all is OK by spot checking a few contacts, appointment, emails, etc.
Click to expand...

Hmmm. I have migrated *.pst's from one PC to another more than a few times. Never had an issue. Except if the *.PST was encrypted, or if the Outlook versions are different. The worst incident was when our friendly IT guys put a new O/S on my work laptop and failed to restore any of my PST files. They said "Everything was copied". Really? Then why is the "My Documents" less than 25% the size it was before? At that point, I simply wiped the "My Documents" from the PC, and restored from my DVD's (this was a few years ago) without incident.

Are you using the "Personal Data Files" for your stuff, or the *.OST file?
 
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My recommendation is to either partition your harddrive or use an external drive and make a backup image of it. I'm not recommending Norton Ghost per say, but rather a program that does exactly what Ghost does. You can image your drive maybe once or twice per month if you feel necessary. Try out the entire imaging process to make sure it works.

Concerning viruses or other trojan programs... this works for me anytime I run into an issue....

1. 1st check ad/remove programs in the control panel for any 'odd' looking programs that shouldn't be there and uninstall them. Some trojans are easy to remove this way. Some are quite sophisticated. In that case proceed on...
2. Run Ad-Aware.
3. Then run Spybot.
4. Then run Malwarebytes.
5. Then run HijackThis. (may be a little advanced for most users - steps 1 to 4 and #6 probably catch 99% of viruses)
6. Follow up with a scan with AVG virus scanner.

All these programs can be downloaded for free and in most cases are better than typical virus suites like McAfee and Norton.

Hope this helps.

Doug
 
I never used Ghost. . .but the one thing I don't like about this "class" of software is that the end file requires Ghost to restore.

On the upside. . Ghost will also backup the system files so you don't have to reload software.
 
This is why I switched to the Mac and Linux. Much, much less time spent doing administrivia. The difference between working for a client and generating billable hours vs. working on problems with my computers and not generating billable hours use to add up to real money. I actually saved money by throwing a practically new windows machine away and buying a Mac rather than trying to clean it up.

Best regards,
Frank
 
To each their own I guess. I don't even keep a full time virus scanner running. If I need to scan something, I do it, but I never have it running in the background.

The only time I run into issues is when I peruse questionable sites for software.

Doug
 
Heh. . .similar story here. My antique computer only has speed problems when running my photo software. When I run the photos software, I dump AVG and ADaware and kill the cable modem.

The only virus problems I ever had on my machine were also related to "questionable" web sites. Winters can be long :) (and each time, the AntiVirus stuff seemed to deal with the problem immediately and painlessly).
 
A lot of these things are still buried in the registry keys even after you delete what seems obvious. Go to www.411.com and add the name of the virus/trojan you are trying to delete and it will give you steps to do it manually. For example: www.spyware.com/adware-pro-2008-removal. BTW, adware pro 2008 is a trojan.
 
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