Replies

I would be careful with MSE. For some reason they don’t test on the VB100 site.
http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/latest_comparative/index
Pretty much all the others do – I would guess 99% of the AV vendors submit for testing here. Why doesn’t Microsoft?
The best are along the top right – NOrton’s up there. You are right, Norton has been getting great reviews since 2010 came out.
If you wanted to add something, I have been using Sandboxie on my laptop and desktop. First read about it on the WS newsletter. Pretty impressive product.
http://www.sandboxie.com/

The only thing about malwarebytes (free) is that most of the rogue spyware tools out there come with a trojan that pretty much renders all the tools and many antivirus impotent against them (even ESET). Also, malwarebytes (free) is a tool and offers no real time protection like your Norton 360. You have to run it to get it to clean, otherwise its doing nothing as you surf the net. It is redundant with 360.

I use malwarebytes to clean monthly, ESET NOD 32, and sandboxie.
hope this helps

Microsoft has Disk Cleanup which will also do what you are asking about if CCleaner did not get it.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Delete-files-using-Disk-Cleanup

I use CCleaner too, excellent for temp files and registry.

Take a look at this
Its not antivirus but its lightweight and free
I run it and you conceivably go without antivirus
http://www.sandboxie.com/
So far there is no malware trojan virus rootkit that can circumvent the protection. You select what you save to the hard drive and take out of the sandbox.

First read about it on the newsletter!

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/remove-palladium-pro
Exact instructions for its removal without doing a complete reinstall. This one came out I believe Jan 1 of this year and bleeping computer had the fix up pretty quick. Its a bad bug, but you don’t have to reinstall.

Actually, when you terminated palladium, you needed to restart your explorer and fix the shell. Then you would not have had to reinstall. Hope this helps.

[*]When the Task Manager starts, click on the Processes tab.
[*]You will now be at the Processes tab as shown in the image below.


When you are at the above screen, scroll down through the list of running processes and left-click once on the palladium.exe process.
[*]Once the palladium.exe process is higlighted, click on the End Process button. When you press this button, Windows will ask if you are sure you want to terminate the process. You should press the Yes button to terminate it.
[*] Palladium Pro will now be terminated and you will be at a blank screen with Task Manager running. Now click on the File menu and select New Task (Run…) from the menu.
[*]When the Create New Task prompt appears, type explorer.exe into the Open: field and press the OK button. After a minute or so you should be back at your Windows desktop.
[*]Now that we have the Windows desktop back, the first thing we have to do is fix your Windows Registry Shell value. If we do not fix this entry and palladium.exe is deleted, then your Windows desktop will not be displayed the next time you reboot.

To fix the Shell entry, simple download the following file to your desktop. If you are having trouble downloading the file, try right-clicking on it and selecting Save as.

Shell.reg Download Link

I did a little searching and microsoft also has a link for that shell file too. I know its late for you, but hoping that if someone else gets the bug, they can fix it the easy way.

Here is the page explaining about AVG Antivirus 2011 rogue malware. Halfway down are the removal instructions with safe and free removal instructions.
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/remove-avg-antivirus-2011

spiritwind has your answer. backup all your docs, stay away from executables
then reformat and reinstall your OS, that bug is nasty and you can’t remove it.
the bleeping computer site info is reliable.
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic210780.html

I checked on the Microsoft site and the upgrade from the RC to Home Premium is $119 which is what I paid for the upgrade that I bought – so actually I didn’t save anything. I really wasn’t trying to save anything except my marriage since my wife was freaking out that the message started saying the RC was going to turn off LOL…

I have been using Win7 64 bit beta and RC version for almost a year and it has performed great. I just upgraded the PC to a purchased upgrade ($119 at Walmart), did a backup, did a clean install and restored the data. I installed the apps including the antivirus AVAST, openoffice, firefox and I don’t remember what else. It is screaming fast in 64 bit mode and so far rock solid stable…

The suggestions to wire your house for both cable and internet are very good. If you don’t use them, they still enhance the value of your house when you sell. I just bought a 2 year old house and it is wired for both. It has two cable jacks and two ethernet plugs included with the phone jacks. I thought what is this for? Well, in the office, i have two computers on the internet and a KVM switch. In the living room, the satellite box is plugged into one of the ethernet slots. My wife has two computers and her laptop plugged into the ethernet. Many of the rooms in the house have been excessively cabled and I love it. So, its not a bad idea to investigate your options and it may pay off when you go to sell your house…

Thanks, I’ll take a look at it when I’m on my wifes computer…

http://www.tutorialsforopenoffice.org/index.html

I use this site frequently to help me with open office. I have both Oo and msft Office, but prefer to use Oo whenever I can which is the majority of the time. Your answer is here…

Some advice needed:

I want to have a group of files backed up here at work… it’s about nine different folders which house some scanned-in information which is not critical but is useful and which we add to daily.

I really don’t need the whole drive done (we do a disc backup on a weekly basis) but I want this one to be a separate backup to a USB drive just to keep the files updated as we go along…

Acronis TI looks a good choice but $50 is a lotta bucks for me… I was wondering what anyone would recommend?

Simple incremental daily b/u software.

It would be simple to configure your computer or whoevers computer to just backup the selected folders automatically with Windows backup. You select the folders and you select the destination (USB drive). You also select the frequency of backup and then you don’t have to trust that someone will do it…

Recently I got this message
your copy of windows 7 beta will cease to work in one hour. So i ran a backup to my backup hard drive. Then I bought a new version of win 7 upgrade, did a clean install and used the restore function. It found the 2 different computers I back up to that hard drive and asked which one. I selected and got all my data back. I think if you keep backing up your hard drive, you will be fine. Certainly there are no guarantees, but my actual experience suggests your worries are for naught…

I have a system on which I suspect there is a rootkit. Since I need to rebuild this computer anyway, I am planning to reformat the HDD and reinstall the OS. Will this get rid of the rootkit? Or do I need to do something on the HDD at an even lower level?

Why do you think you have a rootkit?

Ran Win7 64 bit beta for a year – no BSOD. Just did a full reinstall of Home Premium in 64 bit mode – no BSOD and it installed fast, runs fast and I’m really impressed…