Some techy help needed from my f-list
I am discovering the down side to being known as a geek by my family here. Tech support!
My aunt's computer has decided to play silly buggers. Just before I arrived, her home page in FireFox got switched to Yahoo - she swears she did nothing. I switched it back to Google without a problem and the computer ran perfectly.
About a week ago, she started having problems. It's hard to make out quite what all of the problems are, but it sounds like the computer isn't letting her browse the Internet properly although she can't really articulate what it's doing. She originally couldn't get into MSN either, but that seems to have worked itself out now. The bit that really scared her was that around the same time she had a flood of popups and blue screens warning her that her computer had been invaded by viruses, trojans, worms etc.
Hmmm.
She decided to just shut it down and look into getting someone to clean it up at some stage, but we've all been so busy with shipping arrivals and some work being done on her house that nobody got around to it.
Last night a friend walked her through running a full AVG scan but nothing virus-like was detected. I'm starting to think that those pop-ups weren't from her virus scanner but were webpages popping up with malicious intent. I'll need to check with her one whether she clicked the 'OK' button on any of them because she wasn't too clear on what they were.
Also last night, pop ups kept appearing whenever they were doing anything on her computer. A lot of them were ads but one or two were distinctly unsavoury. All of them were launched from Mozilla, which is her default browser. My aunt's comment was "Mozilla keeps interfering whenever we do anything!"
Her friend attempted to uninstall Mozilla but the computer wouldn't let her, saying that Mozilla was still running even though they'd closed it. So they turned to the computer programmer of the family to solve the problem :-)
I'm leaning towards the possibility that she's got a big spyware/adware problem on her computer. Does this sound familiar to anyone? And does anyone know of some tools that I could download to scan her computer and confirm/disprove my theory? I've never had a problem like this on my own computer so I'm a little uncertain on how to fix these problems!
All help will be gratefully received and virtual chocolate thrown your way.
My aunt's computer has decided to play silly buggers. Just before I arrived, her home page in FireFox got switched to Yahoo - she swears she did nothing. I switched it back to Google without a problem and the computer ran perfectly.
About a week ago, she started having problems. It's hard to make out quite what all of the problems are, but it sounds like the computer isn't letting her browse the Internet properly although she can't really articulate what it's doing. She originally couldn't get into MSN either, but that seems to have worked itself out now. The bit that really scared her was that around the same time she had a flood of popups and blue screens warning her that her computer had been invaded by viruses, trojans, worms etc.
Hmmm.
She decided to just shut it down and look into getting someone to clean it up at some stage, but we've all been so busy with shipping arrivals and some work being done on her house that nobody got around to it.
Last night a friend walked her through running a full AVG scan but nothing virus-like was detected. I'm starting to think that those pop-ups weren't from her virus scanner but were webpages popping up with malicious intent. I'll need to check with her one whether she clicked the 'OK' button on any of them because she wasn't too clear on what they were.
Also last night, pop ups kept appearing whenever they were doing anything on her computer. A lot of them were ads but one or two were distinctly unsavoury. All of them were launched from Mozilla, which is her default browser. My aunt's comment was "Mozilla keeps interfering whenever we do anything!"
Her friend attempted to uninstall Mozilla but the computer wouldn't let her, saying that Mozilla was still running even though they'd closed it. So they turned to the computer programmer of the family to solve the problem :-)
I'm leaning towards the possibility that she's got a big spyware/adware problem on her computer. Does this sound familiar to anyone? And does anyone know of some tools that I could download to scan her computer and confirm/disprove my theory? I've never had a problem like this on my own computer so I'm a little uncertain on how to fix these problems!
All help will be gratefully received and virtual chocolate thrown your way.