So my friend is an idiot...
 

He had a computer given to him.
It's a 1.8 P4, 256 megs of RAM, NVidia GeForce3 TI200, XP Home.
It's made by a company I never heard of, Medion.

He's been using it for about 2 months with no virus protection at all, and he looks at a lot of porn. Well, all of a sudden he calls me and says he can't connect to the internet, he has cable. I told him to call his ISP and tell them... His ISP says nothing is wrong on their end and the modem is fine. Every time you try to go to a site you'll get redirected to marsfind.com, but even that doesn't come up because the URL is huge, but it always starts with marsfind.com. I took over Spybot, Ad-aware, and Spywareblaster. That cleaned up about a million fucking things. Then I went to install NortonSytemWorks2004 and an error comes up during the installation and it just stops. I tried to install it at least 5 times. It's not a legit copy, but I've installed it on 6 different PC's, and I brought that disc home, and reinstalled it on my PC just to make sure there was nothing wrong with it. another weird thing is the task manager won't open. Actually it will once for about a second then it closes on it's own. I was just gonna throw in the original installation disc and start him over from scratch, but he or the guy that gave it to him doesn't have it.

Another thing, after I installed Spybot I tried to get updates for it, and nothing would happen. I couldn't get updates for that or Ad-aware.

I'm guessing that maybe he has a virus, but I'm not exactly sure. If there's anything you can think of for me to try before I wipe his HD clean and set him up with my shit let me know. If I have to go that route I'd like to know if there's a program that'll tell me what brand/model the MOBO is... I already opened the case and I can't find a model or anything like that on the MOBO. Thanks in advance. :)

Might be time to backup and format/reinstall windows.

yea, sounds like it's time to give up hope.

go thru msconfig and remove anything and everything that you dont think needs to be loading at startup.

after that, uninstall every program that has spyware on it.

it'd be best if u did those in safe mode.

Fuck doing all the troubleshooting bs....just reformat and reinstall...it will save you lots and lots of time....sometimes it just not worth trying to salvage windows...

u could save his media files(porn) by shifting it to another drive/partition then format the comp

Goes without saying it, and you probably already know it, sixate, but I'll say it anyway. DON'T back up executables. That includes MS Office documents like .doc, .xls, etc. Nasty little viruses can hide in those too.

Most porn will be safe file types to back up.

Format it! That's all anyone needs to say. It takes like 45 minutes. :)

-Lasereth

OK, you guys convinced me.... I'll just reformat tomorrow afternoon. Obviously, that'll be the easiest way.

If task manager is closing itself right away, it's pretty much guaranteed that he has a virus. If you can get any internet connection, or get to other webpages you could try one of the online Virus checkers.

But Format seems like the best idea. Good luck man.

Edit: I wish someone would just GIVE me a computer like that...it's twice as fast as mine. :(

start->run->msconfig

disable ALL startups and see if internet is restored.

housecall.trendmicro.com do a free online virus scan if internet is working. then say his computer hdd is failed, along with his mainboard and he has to replace his computer. sell him yours (if slower) and teach him a lesson!

past that, format is mentioned before )

REFORMAT !

format/reinstall sounds like a perfect solution :)

Yeah, definitely format. It will make your life much easier. It's probably faster to start over than to try cleaning up his crap.

Medion? I've heard of them once. Best Buy sells some of their stuff.

Format it...

On my laptop at school all my data is on the D: (data) drive and all the Windows files are on the C: drive. If anything fucks up with the system (virus, spyware, etc.) they just Ghost the C: and in around 3 minutes it's back up and runnin'. Always will fix the problem.

I reformatted, and everything was fine within an hour. Plus, I hooked him up with about $500 of software. Then I had to sit his ass down and teach him some things.... Now that the PC has a clean install of XP Pro it runs great, but it would need more RAM if I used it. Hell, even though my PC is way faster I wouldn't mind if someone would just give me a PC like that... He did pay for my dinner when a bunch of us went out to eat tonight.

Oh yeah take soccerchamps advice....ghost can be you most favorite software :)

FWIW, my son in law picked my brain for a few months, not that my brain is that big just slow, to get a quality computer. I put together a few ideas from Dell, Newegg, etc. After all that, he went to price club and bought a Medion because it was cheap. No real friction here, but, whenever he calls for help I remind him it is under warranty and call them, in Germany.