laptop died

[fleck]

ATI is owned by AMD

That's what I meant to say. A moment of drunkenness.

 

[Twizzler09]

haha, s'all good.

Wasn't sure if I was thinking right either, was way too tired. Still am, 4 hours of sleep doesnt help much =P

 

[rboyer]

EDIT: Forgot to mention that its not possible to replace the graphics adapter on a laptop. As they are built in to the motherboard.

Not entirely true. Alot of Dell laptops had removable video cards in them. Basically the interface to the monitor was in the motherboard and the chipset and ram were on a seperate socketed board. Some of them from the later machines are compatible with older models too hence creating an upgrade.

 

[LITTLE FOOT]

ok today im going the buy virus protection software and a mother board/ram/and whatever else i can get right now. ill keep an update on what im doing that way if i am doing someting wrong someone can tell me. thanks for all the help so far

 

[Twizzler09]

Just use the free edition of AVG anti-virus. It works great, and best part.... no cost!

http://free.grisoft.com

looking forward to the updates

rboyer: Really? Was totally unaware of those, might be potential there.... gonna look into that a bit.

 

[fleck]

Yeah since AVG has a free scanner I would not spend money on a virus scanner.

I myself use ClamWin, which is a port of a popular UNIX scanner that a lot of service providers use to scan people's e-mail and other files that users store on their systems. The only problem is it doesn't have a resident that warns you of viruses attempting an attack in real time, but that's not a problem because I rarely ever download from strange sources.

 

[LITTLE FOOT]

well i downloaded winguard and it was just a promo. it is now like a virus. have uninstalled it but it still is working, it wont let me use anything and its always poping up. i have tryed to erase or disable it but it seems to have locked files what can i do?

 

[fleck]

well i downloaded winguard and it was just a promo. it is now like a virus. have uninstalled it but it still is working, it wont let me use anything and its always poping up. i have tryed to erase or disable it but it seems to have locked files what can i do?

It is a virus in itself sorry to say. They just want you to pay.

At this point you have to do what I did, and that is use a boot-up CD to scan your system for viruses before Windows even loads.

There's two options:

Kaspersky
(I used this one and it erased the virus just fine, but it's always a toss up)
http://dnl-eu10.kaspersky-labs.com/devbuilds/RescueDisk/kav_rescue_2008.iso

BitDefender
(This one has a higher chance of working with a newer virus because it has networking capability, but is a 220MB download vs Kaspersky at 108MB)
http://download.bitdefender.com/rescue_cd/BitDefenderRescueCD_v2.0.0_07_08_2008.iso

Now I don't know if you're familiar with burning an ISO file which is a disc image, but any burning software should be associated, if not, open the ISO with your burning software and it should know what to do. I use a free program called ImgBurn http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download

Good luck.

 

[LITTLE FOOT]

i downloaded the one twizzler09 said to. i scanned my computer and it said it got rid of all unwanted files and viruses, but this wingaurd is still there.
i am using firefox now so it wont come up.

^ill try the one you just put up and see how that goes
( i dont think i like computers anymore,lol)

 

[Twizzler09]

Winguard uses a different code altogether than a "normal" virus. WinGuard doesnt harm the computer itself in anyway, so it has no real malicious coding for AVG or any other normal virus scanner to detect. Winguard's sole purpose is to bug to ever-living shit out of you until you pay them, then it goes away etc etc. Or at least thats what they want you to think.

Personally I'd recomend using BitDefender for this, had great success with it multiple times on customer's PCs way back when.

Also a recomendation, if your looking for a program that does anything important, stay away from the ones with "Win" as the first three letters. It is *very* typical of scanner scammers to use the prefix "Win" in an effort to make their program sound genuine. This is not always true, but its a rule I use to keep me out of trouble. Your plight is good evidence of it.

 

[DeanMoriarty]

Another vote for AVG. It works pretty well, it's free, and it doesn't nag the hell out of you to upgrade, like some off the other free anti-virus programs.

I've used a combo of Spybot S&D and Ad-Aware free version for years. There may be better products out there now, but this combo has done pretty well for me. One seems to pick up what the other misses.

Here's a thread about removing the Winguard;http://forums.cnet.com/5208-4_102-0.html?threadID=183513

 

[Twizzler09]

Excellent program choices Dean, the very same combination I use.

AVG does an excellent job, couple it with the dynamic duo (Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D) and you've got yourself locked down real good. I've run these programs for years now, not a single complaint.

 

[LITTLE FOOT]

the trial version of Spybot S&D only fixes 20 errors, i have 244, lol

and i still cant get rid of winguard

 

[smokey]

Download Highjackthis and post up a log and maybe we can tell you what to remove to kill it off.

 

[Psychopete]

Try malwarebytes. You might need someone to help you w/ that, I'd track and kill processes with Process Explorer and delete bad DLLs with unlocker. Most of the time when you kill a lot of this stuff from config files, the spyware/virus is good about putting itself back in. There is also a program called autoruns that can kill start up stuff, hijackthis is also good software. Don't be suprised if the spyware/virus prevents you from running software; this is why I've found that I need to kill it from memory first.

Pete