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Old 08-December-2004, 04:53 PM
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jamestox jamestox is offline
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I'll back up Ut on his recommendations. My wife and I spent the better part of a day trying to clean a friend's computer using the excellent tools Spybot Search & Destroy, Lavasoft's AdAware, and Norton's AntiVirus program. Unfortunately, the hard drive was so filled with malware, viruses and trojans that we eventually ended up wiping the drive and reloading the operating system and software. The system habitually ran slow and often locked up altogether.

We discovered the owner had "inherited" his computer from someone else who downloaded music and videos extensively; after a while, all the malware so badly corrupted the operating system code that, once the malware was gone, the operating system refused to run altogether.

Kazaa is notorious for allowing infiltration to the computer by malware, viruses, trojans, and "worms." I almost hate to say it this way, but playing with P2P sharing in general and Kazaa in particular is a lot like "playing" around with VD - the best method of prevention is abstinence.

Also, in a previous post, you mentioned that someone
Quote:
...downloaded one of the anti-virus programs and it said he had up to 750 or so files that had to be deleted, but that he would have to pay to find out.
This is an example of a program that "plants" malware to "find". It is NOT SPYBOT SEARCH & DESTROY. Most likely, it is "Spyhunter" - or one of the similar varients. Some will find legitimate problems (and add a few of their own), find them (or not), then tell you that you have to pay to "clean" the problems (or detect them). These programs are a rip-off.

If you are at all interested in keeping your computer system as clean and well-running as possible, go to SpyWare Warrior and read about "rogue anti-spyware." Trust me, it's worth your time.

JT
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