Recently Asked Questions - Part 2
XPRT5.DLL / XPRT6.DLL
Many people have had an issue with this file and America Online. I have understood that downloading the ACS software will fix this issue. If you are having this problem and it has not fixed your problem please let me know and I'll help. I'd like to get to the bottom of this issue.
Pop Error After Every Restart
Robert was having an issue when everytime he would start his PC he would get an error message. The answer? Use msconfig to remove the un-wanted startup programs.
Advice On A External Hard Drive
Need advice on what external hard drive to get? Well I don't really have any. Pretty much anything out there @ Best Buy would be good to go. Just make sure you back your data up before its lost!
Upgrading A Notebook Hard Drive
Is it possible to upgrade on notebook purchased on ebay? Of course. Best bet is to let me know the make and model of the laptop so we know what kind to replace it with.
Have a question of your own? Ask it!
Cypher Strength 0 bit - Can't Access Secure Sites
Today was a nightmare. I had a customer that was unable to access secure web sites. They were using Internet Explorer 7 and this happened after a very bad virus. I cleaned up the virus using HiJack This, OTMoveit, and a few other programs. (See a quick guide on how to remove spyware programs). Rebooted and everything was gone. Fantastic. However now they were unable to access secure web sites. So I did what I always do - Googled it. I found a lot of great solutions unforatunately for me none of them worked. I'm happy to say that after a few hours I did figure out what happened and I have the answer here!
Removing SpyWare Manually - Part1
You may have tried everything, you may have downloaded every Anti Virus program you can think of - nothing works. For whatever the reason lets say you want to try and remove that virus/spyware manually. This tutorial will help you do that. It won't be easy and you may want to pull your hair out, the choice is yours. Remove it manually or take it to a repair shop?
Unable to change desktop background?
If you recently have been infected with a virus you may now be unable to change your desktop background. Typically the virus will replace your background with a big ugly. 'You are infected!' background. Of course it'll ask you to buy their 'cure' that will solve all of your problems. This is bad and we want to back to our World of Warcraft background. Here's how to do it.
How to protect your computer
If you own a computer there is a very good chance that your computer is infected with Virus or Spyware programs. They come in many shapes and forms and come at you from many different directions. There are also many tools to help you remove Virus infections once they happen, but the best bet is to avoid these problems all together. How you can prevent infections is what this article is all about.
Blue Screen of Death? Or a hoax?
Recently I've had a few virus programs that was really interesting. I would start up the computer and Windows would start up and then give me the dreaded blue screen of death. Then I would hit CTRL+ALT+DEL, only to see task manager come up. The blue screen was actually just a fake graphic being displayed! Talk about weird. I just wanted to help spread the word of this fake blue screen of death.
After that I just started MSCONFIG, disabled pretty much everything and restarted and proceeded to clean it with out too much trouble. So just remember next time you see the blue screen of death try hitting ALT+TAB or CTRL+ALT+DEL to see if you can get around that, you just never know.
Super AntiSpyware - Is it really super?
If you are like me then you have tried basically every single Adware, Virus, Spyware removal out there. It's difficult to know which ones are 'real' and what ones are fake, which ones actually are actually the cause of spyware infections.
Like always when removing a virus it is typically a very manual process. Basically starting out as removing all unknown startup programs, restarting, seeing what ones came back and how to remove them. I've recently come across a new software program called Super AntiSpyware. It's actually very good and has helped me remove a lot of bad programs. Just install it, update it, boot into safe mode and have it run a full scan. That's it!
Common Methods and Best Practices when removing Spyware
Spyware can be difficult to remove, mostly due to the fact that they don't want to be. You'll almost never be able to go to your 'Add/Remove Programs' and simply click 'Uninstall the big nasty virus'. We all know why, they want their ad program to blast you with ads so they make money.
So what can we do? Lets try a few steps.
Clean out your startup programs
Lets click Start then Run then type msconfig and hit Enter. Now we are in the System Configuration Utility. Click on the Startup Tab and lets see what we have in there. This tab lists all the programs that start when your computer starts. What do you really need here? Well you'll need your anti-virus software and really ... that's probably it. You will see a ton of junk in there from Real Player to Quicktime to Adobe Updater, uncheck all that junk. If you want to update your programs you can do it when YOU want, not have them constantly monitor and tell you when. You will also probably see your printer stuff in there, its probably safe to remove that as well too. If it causes any issues you can always put that check back. Now what you REALLY want to see is a random letter combination. That your virus. Uncheck and some of them are actually that simple to remove. So after you uncheck all of them hit Apply then restart. Did any of them come back? If so you will need to remove them. I'll go over that in our next post :)
Unable to delete files? Try Killbox and OTMoveIT!
Its the same deal, you try and delete a file only to get that same damn error message over and over again 'Access Denied'. So you try booting into safe mode and still the same error?? Well there is another trick you can try and it involves using one or even two of these great programs. They try other methods to remove the file including stopping a specific process when trying to delete and even restarting Explorer.exe during the file deletion. If that does not work it can even set to remove the file during the next reboot.
So if a file is giving you some problems give these great programs a try!
Removing a Virus
Talk about frustration! You found the virus files using HiJack This, you remove them. Yet when you restart they reappear. When you try and manually delete the file you get an 'Access is denied' or something simliar. So what gives? Today we'll be going over some tactics on how to remove files that are in use and are hard to delete.
