Evening Folks:

First, I would like to sincerely thank all of you for your help, your observations and your suggestions. One of the most helpful threads I have been on, bar none.

Second I would like to apologize for some of my less than helpful posts on this thread and my generally pissy attitude. I will not offer excuses as such but a few reasons. I pay good money for good equipment. I am not a geek and therefore do not normally do things to improve performance or whatever. I did not invite these a'holes into my computer and I take it very personnally that they have which is probably a dumb way to think based on the amount of this stuff that goes on.

Like most users, I guess, I just want to enjoy visiting web sites such as this one, read the news, download some pics and so on.

What I did do yesterday was to download Ad-Aware and the Firefox program but I did not "activate" or use them yet. Ad-Aware scanned 153737 "objects" and identified 1122 "critical objects". I was not willing to isolate the whole bunch, and they tell you not to do that, so it is just sitting there. Also the Firefox instructions are probably beyond what I want to try.

Having said that, all of a sudden the popups almost entirely disappeared both late last night and today. I suspect Ad-Aware isolates or quarantines the bad guys until you decide what to do.

Now for the important stuff. My Accounting firm has an in-house IT person who moonlights as a "Tuner" on weekends. And her husband installs networking systems for a living. So, at 0900 tomorrow the tuner will be here and at 1300 tomorrow her husband will be here to do the networking and whatever.
I checked a couple of her references and she is regarded by those people as some sort of miracle worker. No more spam, no more hackers, much faster speeds etc. I gather she installs whatever is necessary to stop the outsiders and then completely goes through the system to get rid of whatever I will never need and generally tidy it up. Her husband then makes everything work together so hopefully I can share printers, be able to print from my office desktop here at the house through my remote connection. All that neat stuff.

At this point, let me say that if I knew what I was doing, I could have probably done all of that myself just based on the advice you folks provided over the last two days. Sadly, I just "don't get it" when it comes to fixing or tuning computers. Much like with my current vehicles, I turn to you folks or Sal or Mike T to get things done properly. My days with carburetors and distributors and fixing and hopping up my stuff are long gone.

You done good guys and I cannot thank you enough.
Oh, BTW, I do speak, read and write 4 languages so I am not a complete idiot, or at least I hope not.
I will report results as they become available.
Bill

 

That's great, Bill. I'm glad you ran the Ad-Aware, as it will clean up almost all of those little nasties and it is also very good at NOT mis-identifying good stuff as bad stuff. There are a few bad nasties out there that can fool Ad-Aware but it sounds like you got most of your problem solved, if not all. Let us know what the tech finds.

And no problem with the 'pissiness'. I've been where you are and you ain't seen pissy yet.

 

RJS:
Well, it would be too boring to do but if you did a complete search/scan on all of my posts, I outdid myself more than once, particularly when I was going through my looking at life through the bottom of an empty scotch bottle phase a while back.

That, however, is a whole 'nother story.

I think this is going to work and I am really looking forward to it. I am a fairly big client with this firm and the owner called me this evening to tell me that "Miss Elizabeth" will be giving me the "premium" tune and that she had done all of his personal stuff and he was totally satisfied. Hope I am the same tomorrow.
Bill

 

I've seen the bottom of that bottle as well except mine was a Bacardi bottle. I met Bill W.and Dr. Bob a few years back, been good friends of theirs for 3.5 years now. Yup, I've seen 'pissy'.


Keep yer hands off Miss Elizabeth until AFTER she fixes the computer!

 

Hehe, I dont think we can even delete our own?

 

Thanks for the tip RJS:
But, remember that she comes to the house at 9:00 and her husband comes to the house at 1:00.

I am not that fast anymore, and Viagra takes at least a couple of hours to function.
Bill

 

On page 1 or 2 of this thread, someone suggested using ZoneAlarm. I downloaded it for free from download.com. It's incredible. It's a very easy to use firewall. In 24 hrs, it has blocked over 150 attempts to probe or otherwise access my computer. It also blocks mysterious programs on my computer from connecting to the internet.

Thanks Bill, for starting this thread. Good luck.

 

Damn! Another of the zombie fleet down......

 

Just Kidding

 

Well, Miss Elizabeth just left (3:00) and a tired puppy she was.
My #1 PC took from 0900 till almost 1200 to fix. She got rid of literally thousands of doofus files, ran 4 different scans which got rid of hundreds of adware, spyware and assorted evil things and generally did the tune up thing. I had done nothing to debug this machine since it was purchased in Sept. 2003 and it was sick.
I now have all the utilities lined up and just need to run them once a week and I should be in good shape. We did install Firefox and it works great but there was a flaw in the attempt to import all of my bookmarks from AOL to Firefox. It not only failed to import them but also knocked out every user name and password on every site I visit. So, now I am resetting everything not only on Firefox but AOL as well.

Bit of a bummer but Firefox is cool and very fast, at least for me.
She also got all the wireless thingies working so I am back to one DSL modem and One wireless router. Also got the file sharing and peripheral sharing straightened out.

She will be back Monday to do some final tuning and to fix one more PC that Pat uses for her sewing machines.

All in all a very good experience. And once again, thanks for all of your help and support. She did about 90% of what you advised so it is obvious you know what you are talking about.
Bill

 

 

arrbilly:

Thanks for the thumbs up and the cheers.

I realize that my thread had bugger all to do with Ford trucks and I really appreciate the extra effort everyone put out to help me through this PC problem.

I guess I would have to say that if my PC, or anyone else's PC did not work correctly, we would not be here.

A lot of us PC Klutzes out here but also a lot of very enthusiastic FMC owners too and anything that can help the process, helps.
Bill

 

Yeah, but did she fix your computer?

 

Yes she did and I have not had one "episode" since.

She was supposed to come back today to do some final tuning and get Pat's machine set up for her sewing and embroidery machines but had issues at work so could not.
A small stroke of luck, my new laptop from Dell arrived today so she will set that up too both wireless here and good to go protection wise wherever I travel with it.

And no, RJS, I did not attempt to molest her although she turned out to be in her middle 30's and quite a looker. I have my priorities well set. Ain't gonna mess with a good thing.
Bill