All Animes: [animeontv] Re: crashes query?

RE: Once upon a time keiman0 shaped the electrons to say... HELP!!!

Whenever I hear so many issues occuring to one person (Hijacked email, applications crashing randomly that don't crash for anyone else) I have to recommend the worst case solution ...

Scrape the machine and start again.

And I mean reformat the hard drive, install the operating system from scratch, install all your applications again from scratch, do all the windows updates and just deal with having to waste a day, lose some customizations and having to reboot a thousand times.

In the last year I have had to deal with a bunch of clients who have caught various viruses, trojans and malware. At first I would try and "fix" the system ... in most cases I spent more time trying to fix the issues than it would have taken to do a complete reinstall, including backing up / restoring thier data.

Malware is becoming so nasty these days that even the best tools cannot get rid of all the damage they cause.

A good test to see if you are totally malwared is to attempt to download and install the free trial of malwarebytes from http://www.malwarebytes.org ... any quality nasty virus tojan malware today is going to prevent you from accessing the site ... or if you get the files from a CD-ROM even allowing the installer to run. I had some malware recently that would let malwarebytes run but lock it up half way through. If you cannot run malwarebytes then you are too far gone for any simple fix.

My malware support policy is now "If I cannot run malwarebytes to fix your computer, we are reinstallng everything. SUCK IT UP!!!"

IF you do reinstall, but do not already have some form of backup media that can easily backup / restore all your stuff (I usually recommend buying a nice 1.5 TB external USB External Hard Drive at $150)
... The following is what I did for one customer who was "on a budget" ...

1) buy a USB to Hard Drive adapter cable ($25 or less)

2) buy a new hard drive for your computer (you can find some as cheap as $50, or use this as an opportunity to get A BIG ONE!!!)

3) install the new hard drive into your computer

4) install OS, Applications and windows updates from scratch

5) (optional) make a backup of this beautiful clean system just in case restoring your data somehow infects you again. (I usually recommend Acronis True Image Home 2009 ($50) and that nice 1.5 TB external USB External Hard Drive I mentioned before.)

6) using the USB to Hard Drive adapter cable attached to your OLD hard drive, copy your data from the OLD to the NEW.

7) keep the OLD hard drive around ... just in case you forgot to restore some data from it. Or perhaps use it as a backup hard drive if it is not too small.

Having said all that ... random crashes in multiple applications could also be a hardware problem. Have you run a memory test recently?

Download and run memtest86 http://www.memtest.org/

Tim

"No I will NOT fix your computer"