Laptop dilemma

[Rookie]

Right, I'm currently using my 2 year old Acer while I'm home from uni, it's now my secondary PC, which I've been lending to my housemate for the last few weeks.

This housemate is nothing short of a computer n00b and has no idea what he's doing. He also has a fondness for pornography - don't we all. This lovely mixture has given me some bloody horrible virus. Basically, it turns Firewall off every now and then, which is veeery scary, it has killed System Restore so I can't do that, and it's just running like crap, crashing all the time.

Now I've got some things on here, like 3GB of music which I don't really want to lose, but I have to get rid of this virus or whatever it is that's causing it. I've had AVG running this whole time, it never picked it up despite being up to date, a scan hasn't shown anything, and my DVD drive doesn't work so I can't just burn everything off.

Any ideas? I've got a format function through Acer eRecovery, but I need to save my files without burning them off.

[Jamie.]

https://housecall65.trendmicro.com/

[syl]

As it's your "secondary" PC why don't you copy the stuff you want to keep (over a network cable) to your "primary" PC - done in 5 minutes. Then reformat, reinstall Windows and copy it back again afterwards.

Sorted.
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Current bike: Kawasaki Z750S

[Rookie]

[Scrapdog]

First of all AVG free version is crap as it does not block or protect against 'script' viruses at all.

There are viruses out there that as their first task they disable your anti virus program entirely leaving them free to replicate themselves and reak their havoc... and if you have some junk like the AVG free version then that will not be a difficult task for it at all..

Second thing it does is disable system restore so that you have no recoverable points..

System restore is ok for system file corruption but not always virus infection as all the restore points get infected too.

If you can just get/steal/borrow an eternal usb drive from somewhere.. dump all your music/files/porn or what ever you want saving.. then reformat the offending machine and reinstall windows

Hopefully you will choose a better anti virus program and firewall next time:

May I recommend Kaspersky Antihacker or ESET Nod32..

Good luck.

[DEN MONKEY]

get yourself a cheap usb flash drive and drop ya music on that.

Then do the reformat thing
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meh

[syl]

[Jamie.]

[Rookie]

Sigh!

I ran Trend Micro, it spend about 3 hours searching, found about 200 items, a few of which were quite serious. When I said 'Sort it out, please' it arsed around for a while, didn't do anything noticeable, and finished itself off! No noticeable change to the laptop.

After spending nearly 2 hours burning DVDs on my brothers' PC to free up some space we shared his free folders and went to send all my crap over.

Got to my laptop only to find that the virus had worked a bit more magic and now the internet wouldn't work (as opposed to working for 5 seconds and then crashing, it now couldn't find a connection at all) so it couldn't find anything on the network either.

I pretty much gave up, salvaged a gigabyte of music and put it on a 1gig flash drive, and restored it to factory settings. And here we are.

[andrew]

Don't let twats use your stuff!

[Rookie]

[andrew]

[panrider_uk]

[djr]