The Most Virus'd Up Computer

Howdy Bird Fans,

So I’m visiting my family this weekend and my brother and his wife manage to get so many viruses on their computer it boggles the mind. Since I left 4 months ago to now they’ve managed to have running around 5 trojans that I’ve now removed and still searching for others. They just do normal surfing the web type activites so I really don’t get how they get so many. I have them set up with AVG virus protection Search & Detroy spyware remover… and they still get littered with viruses and messed up programs.

I do not endorse using pirated software
From time to time I download questionable things from peer to peer and still don’t get the amount of viruses they get.

Anyone else have similar family computers?

yes all the time bro - but thankfully we can educated them - some are starting to do their own research and are starting to seek help…

but yeah - i’ve removed over 700objects off a computer once and that wasn’t all of it -

Your’s can be educated??

My brother used the internet for the first time a few years ago when I moved in with him. He’s only 28 so it’s not like he’s 60 isn’t technologically inclined.

I hate tech supporting for family members. I should have learned a skill-set that no one would ever need, like being a Parrot Trainer. My uncle who knows construction and electrion things gets hit up all the time too.

keyword “starting”

My family’s old laptop has tons of viruses, spyware and other crap on it. I tried to clean it up last week, ran AdAware and Spybot, no virus protection though :frowning: Cleaned off several hundred items, but it still has popup ads all over the place, and “preloaders” for pages that are advertisements like you sometimes see, but even for a simple text page it says ____/3xx kb loaded, and it’s always the same ads etc. This thing needs a reformat, but I’m not going to do it because hopefully we’ll be getting a new laptop within a couple of weeks.

Not looking good though because my sister’s laptop crapped out last week, and refueled my father’s rage against Microsoft. “Why reward them with buying more of their s***?” type of deal…

yeah the computers the stupid one - Said Like Nick the computer guy

I just decided to go through his progams list and uninstall anything I’d never heard of. One program required me to type in like a serial number just to remove it. The serial was printed above and I had to retype the 16 alphanumerics to remove it. It was even case sensitive… what a mess.

Force them to use some alternative browser than IE, that’s the best way…

Once I was repairing an aunt’s computer and it had so much spy/adware installed that I couldn’t bring up IE (it crashed immediately). I had to use the command line ftp client to download Mozilla Firefox, and then use that to download Spybot.

I then set it as their default browser, and since then I haven’t had to fix things once.

[offtopic]congrats on the 3000 ethan ;)[/offtopic]

One good thing to do is run Windows Update from time to time.

Can’t forget about updating virus definitions too.

lol. Just yesterday I volunteered to clean up a friends computer. From what he’s describing it’s a real mess. I told him that I’d give him a run down on how to maintain his computer and he didn’t sound all that excited so I’m hoping that this doesn’t turn into a regular thing. I don’t mind doing that sort of stuff for people who are willing to learn a little, but it seems like most of my family and friends just rely on the fact that I’ll fix their computers so they don’t do anything in terms of maintenance.

this is just like my bro’s notebook, never done a virus check or anything for him, but it’s filled with spyware, and you can tell just by starting up there are tons of ads. He claims to run norton all the time, but it obviously doesn’t protect him. And… he uses this version of ie that has weird backgrounds and things that drive me insane!

But I’m sorry your family can be annoying

All of this calls for an inconsiderate format. Find their important documents, back that up, wipe the rest. No matter how much they cry afterwards, it’s for their own good. Computers have feelings too you know?

Great… Now after reading this thread I just re-installed AVG…

Formatted 2 weeks ago and never bothered to put it on…

and now I guess I will have to put Ad aware back on…

Thanks guys… I was living in the land of ignorance in bliss until all you woke me up again !

Ok, so my trip to Portland also involved me working on a friends computer because I knew he was infected with viruses as I get infected emails from him all the time.

I installed AVG (he had no anti-virus program installed), and then ran a check.

25,910 Infected Files Isn’t that some sort of record??

People need to get into the Habit of clearing cookies , temp Internet files, histories, old out of date emails, some of them old emails espacially the ones with attachments
((you clean-up thier system and then they go back and open the Old infested attachment)) aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Reminds me of the time I was visiting my folks and my mom was talking about getting a new mouse because hers was “slowing down”. I popped it open (we’re talking the old kind here with the rollerball, not electronic) and believe me when I say it had never been opened and cleaned before. Talk about gross! An hour and 45 Q-tips later I showed her the pile of crap I had pulled out of there and she was shocked at what kind of lint and grunge a mouse picks up. She had no idea you could even OPEN the thing . . . :sigh:

Most I have had was 80 detected in Norton 2004 and 146 in Ad-aware

I would rather have every virus that ever existed on my computer than have a single piece of Norton software…

Screw Norton !

(Note: My hatred for Norton stems back to Windows 95, paid good money for software that made my PC more unstable than any virus ever did. Once was enough from them.)

great input from everyone here :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ve had the same sort of experience with my desktop P4 - AKA the ‘family computer’.
Although I recently forced everyone to use Firefox, there’s still a whole lot of adware/spyware from when we used to use IE. AdAware, Spybot S&D, blahblah etc etc

  • None of it worked. Using new laptop made me realise just how slow and bogged down the desktop really is…

So now im in the process of backing up about 35gb of files onto DVD-Rs.
Gawww i just wish i had the time and money to try out Mac OS :frowning:

ATTENTION ATTENTION ATTENTION ATTENTION ATTENTION ATTENTION

The World Record for Most Infested Computer has just been Broken!!!
On my same trip I went into a friends store to help him clean his laptop. I knew he had tons because I always get virus emails from people he would know. Well after my few hours of running tests. I removed…

… 26,900 infected files!

I didn’t know that was possible. He’s been using his computer for 2 years with NO anti-virus.

How many different virusses? I ran AVG for the first time in months today, it found 127 infected files, but only one virus (it had infected all of the other infected files found or created them).