Tip O’Tex Computer Club

January 2006 Newsletter

Computer Nightmare

(A True Story)

Just before Christmas, Lee Mallam told me that her computer had been acting very sluggish when she turned it on. That had been going on for a few days.

Further investigation showed that her Norton had updated on Dec. 21, and that was about the time the slow-down started.

We used Remote Assistance, where I was able to take control of her computer with Windows Messenger (MSN Messenger) from Tucson, AZ. How neat is that?

We found that:

Norton LiveUpdate wouldn’t work

AVG wouldn’t download

ClamWin wouldn’t download

Trend-Micro web site couldn’t be reached

Panda web site couldn’t be reached.

Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware couldn’t be updated

McAfee installed, but couldn’t do an online scan

Using a webpage www.megaupload.com I was able to send AVG, FireFox and ClamWin to Lee, but after she got them downloaded, they wouldn’t install.

We worked on this problem for three days, off and on. I called one local person for her, to see if he could clean up a virus infected computer (assuming that was the problem) without reformatting, and was told that it would be best to do a complete reformat to make sure any viruses were gone. Not my way of doing things, so we kept looking. Another said he would try very hard to clean it without reformatting, and we figured that would be good.

Meanwhile, we decided to get rid of Norton, as it wasn’t doing any good. I was about to tell Lee to go ahead and uninstall it, when she told me that she had done so, and that now things were working much better.

AVG installed - ClamWin installed – Search & Destroy updated and ran, as did Ad-Aware. McAfee wasn’t as easy to get rid of, but that finally got done.

With AVG updated, a scan showed over 30 infected files, which were put into the Virus Vault. However a second scan found them again. I remembered System Restore, and had Lee disable that. Then she ran a scan, put the files into the Virus Vault, enabled the System Restore, ran a scan and WHEE - clean.

All of that is a very BRIEF synopsis of what we went through. A lot of mental anguish and gnashing of teeth were involved, but we ‘got ‘er done” and all is well in Paradise (Park, that is – in McAllen.)

MegaUpload

www.megaupload.com

This web site is a very handy place. You can send files up to 250 MB there, although it may take a while using dial-up, but its still a good way to send those big pictures, or movie shots. If you try sending files over 1 MB with e-mail, your server may not like that. Even some broadband servers don’t like files over 15 MB.

I found this page because I was looking for a way to send a 23 MB file to someone in Florida. I asked Tracy if I could upload it to my Comcast account and then have the person go there to get it, with my password. She said that was too big for Comcast to allow stored on the site, but I should try two web sites that could do it. Of the two, I preferred MegaUpload. I have used it with three different people over the last few days, and it works well, whether an expert, novice or somewhere in-between.

Try it out. You can try sending me a file, if you like, to see how to send, and if you’d like, I can send you one so you can see how to receive files. mailto:bobbie2836@comcast.net

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