As you know, I have had a particularly tricky virus on my PC which, apart from popping up sites all the time, had disabled my ability to restart, shutdown or hibernate my PC.
I tried AVG, Windows Defender and Ad-Aware. None of them got rid of it. Tonight I finally installed Spybot S&D and guess what! It found the little bugger, healed it, and when I re-booted (manually shutting the power off) – the problem is solved. I can shutdown again! Hooray! Thank you Spybot S&D.
Did you ever find out the name of the little bugger?
Cam you are running Vista aren’t you, isn’t it meant to be the most secure OS??
Yes I am running Vista Business edition and it’s only secure if you drop it into a tub of wet cement… and let it dry.
In all seriousness, this is the first time EVER that I’ve had trouble with a virus. EVER. In 12 years of being on the web.
Herne, Spybot picked up about 12 separate boogers, all related I guess. I think it had something to do with a toolbar I added to IE.
I am surprised you didn’t already have Spybot already installed. There is no one anti malware/spyware program that catches everything. On my old PC I always had a virus program as well as ad-aware and spybot along with another anti-spyware program whose name escapes me atm.
Should only run one virus program but for anti-spyware I ould be running 2-3 at all times just to try and be safe.
Cam!? You use IE!? For shame!
I thought we all knew that Firefox was the way to go? The only thing I ever installed in IE was the Google toolbar and then I even removed all the “talk back” crap that they included in it. Now it’s Firefox 2.0 on both my Mac and PC…and Google is built in.
Friends don’t let friends install Vista.
Hell no, I don’t use IE. Do I look lame??
🙂
The only reason I was using it was because I wanted to play with the Alexa toolbar to see if I could figure out why TPN’s Alexa ranking is all over the shop. And there isn’t an Alexa toolbar for FF.
Looks like the alexa toolabr I installed had shitware in it.
Apparently this plug-in for Firefox will do a similar check; http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/
This is why I’m moving to Linux. I got fed up with all the security bloatware required to keep Windows operational for one. All that crap brings my machine to a crawl. I still run Windows for the few apps and testing I need, but this time stuffed inside a virtual machine.