OMF:BG Message Board

[Raven]

Enter the Dell Inspiron 2200. Celeron M 1.4ghz processor, 1.25 gigs of RAM, and the full Dell package installed. He said it was running slow. So I decided, just for kicks, to run a full virus scan using the install of McAfee he's got going. 4 hours later I finally get the results from it I was looking for. 90,000 entries in his machine. 30,000 registry entries and 60,000 files. No viruses were found. CCleaner removed about 2 gigs of junk and 400 or so useless registry entries. Now I'm running Spybot S & D to further this cleanup. (25 minutes later it finishes. only 7 items found.)

Sometimes the touchpad wigs out, the cursor is just flying around on the screen on its own, but only on it's X axis. Sometimes it works fine. It seems to be vaguely related to the CPU use, which randomly jumps from 0% to 66% on a whim while idle. At idle it also uses between 300 and 500 megs of RAM. Again, it's kind of random how much it's using. The cursor is fine when I use my USB mouse.

McAfee Site Adviser sometimes flares up, running between 13 and 34 instances of itself at a time. I don't even bother touching the thing when it does this. It's about as responsive as Raptor is to a new FPS.

There's so much junk on this machine. I'm totally overwhelmed. I just had to post this. If you have any advice let me know. I just need to make it faster and get the mouse to work again.
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"The unofficial first person to edit their sig since 2009! Possibly 2008."

Scorpion Navy Issue

[raptor]

[ouch]

first thing you need to do is to slap the hell out of the guy for owning a dell. once you've done that remove mcfee first thing as it's the most intrusive virus protections out there. second, go to trendmicro's site and do an online scan. (housecall) Third, remove any file or entire directories with the name "Dell" written in the file name. also look at the task manager for any of them that might be running.

That will probably solve 80%-90% of the problems. let's see whats left after these steps.

Dell and to a lesser extent, emachines, seem to make a lot of money by haveing adware and advertisement links (which often goes to a site that offer adware filled downloads) Some of that stuff might of been pre-installed. especially when you consider the fact that most adware programs auto downloads other adware programs, which of course downloads other adware programs, which downloads other adware, which... well you get the idea...
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"Float like a Mantis, sting like a Cheatlord..."

ouch

scientifically engineered to hate StarForce

[Raven]

Raptor: My own rigs gets it every 6 months. This one, it's a last resort.

Ok, I took your advice and uninstalled everything with the word "Dell" on it as well as McAfee. I think I just shaved 2 minutes (Literally, 120 seconds) off the load time. Not bad, but at 3:30 it's still nothing to write home about. Now I'm removing anything that the add / remove programs window says hasn't been used within 6 months.

Hopefully by Friday the IDE to USB cord I bought off Newegg will show up. I'm just going to pull the HDD and run scans on it from this machine. Good thing Windows based spyware is fairly limited to Windows based machines.
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"The unofficial first person to edit their sig since 2009! Possibly 2008."

Scorpion Navy Issue

[Zelig]

Unselect everything from the startup tab in msconfig, then re-enable anything that's necessary.

Run superantispyware. I know the site looks bad, but the program is quite excellent. It, and spybot are the only spyware scanners I use.

[Lurker]

Thanks Zelig. My dad just had a flood of trojans and stuff on his computer and he's having trouble with it. I'll forward the link to him.
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Leader of the Forgotten Clan
Laptop Bunny Stats
()_() Mobility Radeon HD 5870
( ._.) Intel Core i7 1.6GHz (720QM)
((")(") 8 GB RAM
Windows 7 - 64Bit

[ouch]

ok, there is still some useless crap running upon start up. So start up spybot, go to tools, system start up.

again look for anything with dell in it, and especially anything that is highlighted in red. be on the lookout for programs you don't reconise as well. be sure to just disable the startup instance for now in case it does happen to be important. (also be on the lookout for traces of mcfee floating around)

once the computer is rebooted hunt down the location of those files you disabled and remove them, and anything that obviously belongs to that file. (like if a file was in a directory called "super fun dell awsome app" then just delete the whole directory.)

by now you probably screwed up quite a few registry entries, So to fix those go into spybot again, tools, and system internals. then click check and then fix selected problems when it's done checking.

now to save some space: open up a dos window and type this command:

del c:\windows\kb*.log

those files are just logs from windows updates, to remove the uninstallers (and gain 400mb-1gb of space) do the following:

go into the windows directory and be sure you have hidden files and system folders shown and delete any folders that start with "$NtUninstallKB".

Now do a scandisk and defragment operation as you likely removed several gigs off the hardrive.
_________________
"Float like a Mantis, sting like a Cheatlord..."

ouch

scientifically engineered to hate StarForce

[Spockmeat]

After running the typical tools you guys have listed, I always like to run HijackThis http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/programs.php
It's helped me find some things the other scanner don't, but I've found I typically have to do much more manual research on everything listed than with the automatic cleaners.
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"Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas." Joseph Stalin

Blind patriotism

[Raven]

Well, the laptop left for it's owner. I couldn't fix everything without a reformat. He had gigs and gigs of pictures, about 2 thousand of them at 2048 X 1536 resolution each. I considered doing a backup of them for a reformat, but the search alone took over an hour. On top of that I have no blank media. =\

In the end, I took 3 days of cleaning crap off that thing and I sent it back not charging a damn thing because it's so ****ed up that I couldn't fix it completely. I'd rather take that hit than put my name on half a repair job.

This is why I stopped fixing PCs in the first place. I only took the first laptop (Before this one) is because it belongs to a friend and she happens to be pretty hot.
_________________
"The unofficial first person to edit their sig since 2009! Possibly 2008."

Scorpion Navy Issue