A friend of mine has a 3yr old HP laptop. Its running Vista and with all the service packs originally ran ok. Then it got some kind of virus (Norton Installed) a system restore was done & I am told it got rid of the virus (seems crazy that it would work) but now the dvd drive is not being recognised by the pc, an external drive was also not being recognised, anyone any ideas?

 

Reformat. Guaranteed way to kill the virus.

 

Thats kinda what I thought, also I don't see how a system restore would remove the virus, I also think she would be better going back to Xp, to many conflicts with Vista!

 

From my experience, Vista was never that great. I've got a laptop that's running it now and random things continue to screw up on it. It no longer recognizes printers and the toolbars change colors every time it's booted up.

Windows 7 on the other hand has been great. No screw ups in the 10 months I've had it on this PC.

 

Ya it sounds like the virus is still there, I would pull anything she needs off onto an external hd and then reformat like punisher said. I would not however move down to xp, I would instead switch to windows 7. I for one had no problems with vista while I was running it but lots of people did, I again have had zero problems with windows 7 and have been running it since about 2 months before the official release. Most people love 7 and it seems microsoft got this one right because there seems to be even less problems with 7 than there were with xp. People often forget that before service pack 2 xp was somewhat of a nightmare.

 

I'll chime in and agree with the Windows 7 recommendation. As for the re-format... kinda sounds like chopping off a finger to fix a hangnail, but I guess it's the most sure fire way to make sure the virus is gone.

 

That's a pretty good metaphor describing this situation, but with today's virus's, you can never be too sure.

 

Download Malwarebytes (www.malwarebytes.org). Reboot in Safe Mode with Networking, install Malwarebytes and allow it to update. While still in Safe Mode run a full scan - that should get rid of any virus.

If you don't have Internet access on the affected computer you won't be able to just let it update the AV signatures. You'll have to download them from here and run the update manually: http://data.mbamupdates.com/tools/mbam-rules.exe

 

X2. I had nothing but problems with my work HP laptop running Vista. It's only been a couple of weeks since I upgraded to Win7, but so far so good.

 

Thanks for the suggestions guys, I have passed them on & I guess we will see what happens!!