Hello there :-)
- Thread starter Sonyaa
- Start date
- Status
- Mar 16, 2013
- 582
- Apr 9, 2013
- 3
Thank you all for your welcomes 
I got on this site after doing some search related to protecting
or fixing my crashed PC. It kept running slower and slower even
though I was using the same levels of resources like the RAM,
CPU, network traffic, and so on.
Finally, a friend told me to run netstat and we found an established
port that disappeared after a while, but not before I got the IP
address. My friend traced it to a company that sells keylogging
software.
That was a terrible thing to have on the computer, although I
type in few passwords and account numbers since I use Norton's
Identity Safe. But it didn't explain the slowness. Then he sent
me a program called GMER or something similar; it has a random
name so that malware won't recognize and disable it.
It found all sorts of things wrong, including an altered master
boot record, which as my friend said, meant "game over". Then
I had to rescue what I could, while being sure that I didn't rescue
infected things.
I had to reinstall Windows Vista, which crashed twice while going
thru the updates process. Since I had a newer motherboard than
the one that came with the system (another story), the recovery
partition and recovery disks I so carefully made wouldn't work. The
O/S and everything else had come preinstalled, so I had to find a
copy of Vista. The only one I could get a hold of was service pack
1, so there were lots of updates. I have learned not to perform
them all at once!
So I am on my third reinstall of Vista and I am applying the updates
just five at a time. I applied service pack 2 first, hoping it would
alleviate the need for many of the updates. This process seems to
be working okay, but geez, it is slow. And I won't even go over
the nightmare of getting my usable files off of my C: drive, seeing
as I didn't have a spare drive lying around at first and didn't have
room on my second hard drive or my external one.
Since these nasties got thru Norton 360, I know I need to use either
additional or more protection. I paid for MalWarebytes main program
and am using Avast right now, although they will want $ in twenty
days. I got a free copy of SpywareBlaster by going thru TrialPay.
I have trial versions of ESet and BitDefender and SuperSpyware
and Windows Firewall is on the system already.
I haven't decided what to do, although I would prefer not to spend
any more money. OTOH, I want to be safe, but not so safe that
all my protection makes my system run slower than it did when it
was infected.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thank you in advance
I got on this site after doing some search related to protecting
or fixing my crashed PC. It kept running slower and slower even
though I was using the same levels of resources like the RAM,
CPU, network traffic, and so on.
Finally, a friend told me to run netstat and we found an established
port that disappeared after a while, but not before I got the IP
address. My friend traced it to a company that sells keylogging
software.
That was a terrible thing to have on the computer, although I
type in few passwords and account numbers since I use Norton's
Identity Safe. But it didn't explain the slowness. Then he sent
me a program called GMER or something similar; it has a random
name so that malware won't recognize and disable it.
It found all sorts of things wrong, including an altered master
boot record, which as my friend said, meant "game over". Then
I had to rescue what I could, while being sure that I didn't rescue
infected things.
I had to reinstall Windows Vista, which crashed twice while going
thru the updates process. Since I had a newer motherboard than
the one that came with the system (another story), the recovery
partition and recovery disks I so carefully made wouldn't work. The
O/S and everything else had come preinstalled, so I had to find a
copy of Vista. The only one I could get a hold of was service pack
1, so there were lots of updates. I have learned not to perform
them all at once!
So I am on my third reinstall of Vista and I am applying the updates
just five at a time. I applied service pack 2 first, hoping it would
alleviate the need for many of the updates. This process seems to
be working okay, but geez, it is slow. And I won't even go over
the nightmare of getting my usable files off of my C: drive, seeing
as I didn't have a spare drive lying around at first and didn't have
room on my second hard drive or my external one.
Since these nasties got thru Norton 360, I know I need to use either
additional or more protection. I paid for MalWarebytes main program
and am using Avast right now, although they will want $ in twenty
days. I got a free copy of SpywareBlaster by going thru TrialPay.
I have trial versions of ESet and BitDefender and SuperSpyware
and Windows Firewall is on the system already.
I haven't decided what to do, although I would prefer not to spend
any more money. OTOH, I want to be safe, but not so safe that
all my protection makes my system run slower than it did when it
was infected.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thank you in advance
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