Posted on 05/29/2011 5:09:43 AM PDT by Daisyjane69
I'm typing fast. My computer is restarting itself every 20 minutes or so.
While finishing my news site browsing before bed, I got a pop up claiming Adobe. I tried to ignore it. Since I had an Adobe file open, I finally relented and agreed to install. BIG MISTAKE. It was a Trojan virus and is in the process of destroying my computer.
Trojan.Win32.Generic.paklacobra
I heard that Macs are better as far as viruses. Is there a reputable dealer that sells Macs? I don't imagine I can afford a brand new Mac.
Failing that, would there be another browser other than IE that would be less hospitable to viruses? This tower is only two years old. And I'm getting messages telling me:
Damaged hard drive clusters RAM usage is critically high RAM memory failure Hard drive failure
This virus is attempting to wipe out my AdAware & AVG as we speak.
I store NOTHING of value on this computer. No photos, movies, passwords, account numbers. I do NO online banking.
I was able, after several tries, to finagle one measly operational window, and it's what I'm using to post this to the people who know everything important...FReepers.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm a plant chick, not a computer chick! LOL
Also, please forgive me if you post a suggestion and I don't reply right away. I have no idea if this window is going to work 5 minutes from now, let alone 5 hours from now. If TSHTF on this thing I won't be able to check replies until Tuesday at the library (as we are in a holiday weekend). Naturally....
I should have been in bed 4 hours ago, and I've been playing around with this box of wires ever since, and I'm exhausted.
This was scary as hell. I never saw anything gobble up things as fast as this miscreant. I knew something was dreadfully wrong within 10 minutes.
Thanks for any help & ideas you have.
Back your machine up about two weeks.
Vista? Forget the OS and install a fresh instance of Win 7. Upgrade is cheap and you wont regret it.
I’m probably lucky, drift. Because right away, AdAware hit me with a notice that it was trying to prevent the installation.
Something’s telling me that if my AdAware wasn’t up to date, I wouldn’t even be able to post this measly thing on freepers.
But this thing ran by my system like Pac-man gobbling up those little dots. Scary stuff.
Oh - and always back up onto a second hard drive. Macintosh computers have a program built into the operating system called Time Machine that will automate this process if you have a backup drive.
Isn’t Safari a Mac program?
Prominent conservative websites are always under attack from those who eat, breathe and sleep their politics 24/7. A couple of years back, it was Lucianne’s site that gave my computer a deadly virus/trojan of some kind.
2012 is gonna be a rough election year. Everyone should make sure s/he has a good anti-virus program on his/her computer.
Yes it is like internet explorer. You use it to go online. I got an Imac a few months ago and it is like night and day. So much better.
People who write this garbage are very very good and they make LOTS of money doing it. They are also mostly immune to any kind of prosecution because of where they are (China and Russia).
SugarSynch will give you 5 gigabytes of free on line storage. Back up your important stuffs there and learn how to reformat your computer. This will wipe it clean of everything
I use free Sugar Sych and it works great
Install Microsoft Security Essentials. It is free and covers just about everything.
Your problem of rebooting might be electrical...not due to the virus you speak of
It can come in an email or Facebook.
Many of them are designed to look like computer warnings, so it’s also possible that you might have saw something that looked like a Vista warning, or whatever system you are using, and you clicked on it thinking it was Windows.
I had the same thing happen three days ago. Same virus that eventually incapacitated the operating system by blocking and removing more and more stuff. I eventually was able to run microsoft security essentials and remove the trojans, but there was still too much damage to use the computer. I tried everything but eventually had to do a system recovery which formats the hard drive and goes back to the originally installed operating system and settings. Lost everything, but fortunately I keep all important files and all my bookmarks on a thumb drive. Working fine now...again.
boot into safe mode and see if you can’t get system restore to take you back a week or so
If you cannot boot into safe mode your problem might be lectrical
I once got a virus so bad that it even damaged the hard drive. It was a sleeper virus that lay dormant until sometime in December. Each time the computer was rebooted, another important system file was altered/destroyed.
When the tech people tried to reformat my hard drive, they found it would no longer allow 32 bits and would only configure at 16.
It could have been the Drudge site then? His site is a favorite target of those who hate “right wingers”.
I feel pretty stupid for asking this question, but we’re all friends here, right?
When someone tells me to boot into a safe mode (or any other mode, for that matter), I have no idea what they are talking about.
I just walk up to my computer and it’s on. I don’t know how to find a mode, safe or otherwise. I click on Free Republic. That isn’t the “safe mode?”
:)
Probably through JavaScript. I run Firefox with an add-on called “NoScript”. You tell Firefox via settings to turn JS on, and then NS controls which sites gets to run JS on your system. A white list/black list sort of thing. And since a lot of sites host JS from other third parties like google-analytics, you can disallow those but still run the JS needed by the site you’re on.
NoScript is a great add-on for a browser.
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