I have a laptop I use for ‘experimenting’ with. As I have no essential data on there I can web about to my hearts content. And I mean some dodgy content here.

Thought I’d see if I could get some serial numbers and activation codes, ahem, from some dodgy sites. In the past I have had some success with these trawls. Not the other night though. Hell. Tried loads of them and none of them worked, though AVG anti virus did trap about 10 virus’s which I was grateful for, but some spyware - Spy Sheriff - did manage to get itself loaded. I’m not that bothered by these horrid little things as I have a recovery disk so that within 10 minutes I can be back to where I was before any kind of infection.

The AVG anti virus trapped something called secure32.dll so I consigned that to a bin somewhere but that file was used by the Spy Sheriff spyware that did get loaded. Heaven knows what it would have done. When I next started Internet Explorer 7 I got an error message that the secure32.dll file was missing and then IE just stalls. Proof that the Spy Sheriff was trying to run.

I unloaded IE and restarted it and it started OK displaying my 4 home pages.  Tried to uninstall Spy Sheriff via ‘Add or Remove Programs’ and Windows couldn’t even see it. Ran Ad-Aware and that found a few bits and pieces in the 5 minute run, but not the Sheriff. Ran the free version of Spybot Search and Destroy which thrashed about for an hour and found 62 of the little critters. Let S&D remove them, and lord knows what else.

Rebooted and the laptop ran seriously slow. Ran SFC and that ran slow and took about 2 hours. When I run SFC on my desktop PC almost immediately I need to insert the XP disk so it can repair any damaged and missing files. When I run SFC on the laptop, twice now, it doesn’t ask for the XP disk to be inserted in the drive. That’s either because XP is in perfect condition, unlikely, or more likely there’s a hidden partition on the drive containing recovery files where SFC is getting them from.

Anyway SFC finally completed and I rebooted. Oh no I didn’t. It sat there ’saving settings’ for an hour or so. Too many settings to save or what. Switched off. Enough. Wonder if it’ll start tonight. Its great having a machine you can do this stuff with and not have to worry.

Quote of the day

‘People want economy and they will pay any price to get it’ Lee Iacocca (1924-)

Phew. Finally got rid of the darn virus, I think.

Yesterday, with the dodgy version of XP Pro installed, everything was running like tickety-boo, till I ran PC Tools AntiVirus which found the beloved thing hiding somewhere, but still didn’t know how to get rid of it. I clicked on some control for more information and was displayed the path to it. Tried to delete it but I was told it was in use by an application.

It seems that just by displaying its path it was enough for the virus to invoke itself as almost immedialely the PC slowed to a crawl and there was a hell of a lot of hard disc activity going on, and I wasn’t actually doing anything. Started to reboot, which took at least 5 minutes, and when back up ran a couple of virus checkers and left it to chugg.

When I got back home later that day, there it was in all its glory the bluescreen of death. Ho-bloody-hum. Ran the PC’s recovery option, F10 at boot, which promised to restore without losing data, which was good. When it had finally finished and rebooted, XP wouldn’t start, but instead displayed an error message that it was upset by the license or serial number. Probably because the number it was recovering from, as originally on the PC, was different to the hooky XP Pro number. Re-ran XP Pro which installed ok and started up ok. This time I saw all the desktop icons that I remember from when I originally bought the machine, obviously set up from the recovery session.

The virus was still there but not running. Started in Safe Mode to try and delete the virus but a whole lot of folders were not viewable including those with the virus. How convenient. Re started PC in Safe Mode Command prompt. This time, though the same folders were not viewable from the prompt was I able to change directory to them and eventually see the virus and delete it. Job done.

Well it will be if I haven’t been blue-screened in the next week.

Quote of the day:

‘If you drink, don’t drive. Don’t even putt’ Dean Martin (1917-1995)