going to war

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Ok people thought id see if im missing anything here

Going to my mates house and he has a bad case of spyware, he has got a message telling him that he has 180 (ish) bits of spyware and that some are compromising his privacy etc.

Hes on XP so to start ill turn off restore, then do a spybot search and destroy scan which should get rid of the spyware, his anti virus i think is out of date and ive never heard of it so ill put some on, like panda or trend micro, and ill also use C Cleaner to get rid of any evidence as im sure one of the family has been looking at porn site (lol) .

Is there anything else i should do / consider

Ed

 

180 bits of spyware? You should consider wiping and reinstalling... trying to pry each and every one of them out cleanly may not be very efficient, and if you miss even one, you might as well have not even bothered prying them out individually.

If you had said 5 or 6, I'd have suggested prying each one out... but 180? Totally different story.

 

Last time i had this problem was on my own computer and it was because i had downloaded some software without scanning it first.

I can see saying the word reformat to these people will shock them etc so thats why i was thinking of going around thw wall rather than going straight through it so to speak

Ed

 

I would attempt to clean it first, but with that much spyware you might have to reinstall the OS like BM stated.

 

If you can copy their data to another location, the OS and apps can be easily reinstalled... at least, easier than prying 180 pieces of trash out... then seeing what didn't work and retrying... etc.

 

if your not going to go a refromat, you will need to run spyware several times. Run it then reboot, then run it again. I would do atleast 3 times if not 4. Spybot doesn't always get everything first or 2nd time specially when it is that heavy.

 

I'm with Mike on this one !

 

I would suggest trying Hitmanpro : www.hitmanpro.nl

This runs 5 or 6 different spy removal tools and I think it's very effective.

Good luck!

 

Just went on the site to check out the Hitmanpro utility and got something interesting instead.

Maybe they experiencing problems on their end?