Dial up connection has a life of its own

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This is the second morning...not in a row...that I woke up to check my e-mail and my computer was already on the internet. I checked the connection status and it had been up for almost three and a half hours. My daughter also said she once found the computer connected and thought I'd left it on. I distinctly remember disconnecting before I went to bed last night.

I have three computers, all dells, all running xp pro, all with dial up modems, and this computer is the only one I have problems with. Any ideas?

 

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I guess it could be a number of things. My first thoughts are a piece of software thats is trying to connect to the net for some reason. In the past I've had this but not that I would arrive at the PC and it would be online.

As a fix, how about removing the tick from remember password on the dial up connection. As far as whats causing it, try taking a look in the services in Task Manager and see if you can notice anything that running that shoulnt be.

Just my initial ideas Trip.

HTH, Si

 

Thanks. Actually, I was wondering about a piece of software put on the PC by a visit to an unscrupulous site. I installed Ad Aware and ran it. I also got rid of McAfee, which came as a 90 day free trial and installed Norton, updated the virus definitions from www.sarc.com and hoped for the best. So far, the beast is well behaved.

 

Hope you've got it sorted by now, Trip, but have you checked your dial-up settings. specifically the number your machine is dialling ?

Some spyware will actually change your dial-up settings so's you dial a premium-rate no. instead of your normal ISP. Sorry if already aware of this, but I've seen it a few times - had one guy who's phone bill was about £100 over its normal, all due to this happening.

 

Thanks for the heads up, Gav. I've been all over the dial up settings and the number is the one I put in. Haven't had an instance of the machine dialing up since I used ad aware to scan for and delete all the crud in my files, folders, and registry and updated my anti-virus software and definitions. Hopefully, this is the end of the story.

I had a problem like this but a lot worse in the past. It was right after the Spider-Man movie came out and one of my sons went particularly "spider-crazy". He found a site where he could download spider-everything. I woke up one day and found that Spider-Man was my screen saver, desktop, cursor, everything. Lots and lots of freeware and all the adbots and malware my machine could hold. It took me almost a week to get all that garbage out of there and get everything back to normal. We all had a nice long talk about the problem and not downloading anything without first asking me.

Except for a couple of little games, they've been pretty good about it. I hope this story can save someone else a big headache.

 

Curious one, Trip.

I'd imagine that Adaware had more to do with solving it than uninstalling McAfee, but you can't be too sure. After all, McAfee could (and should) be set to download updates automatically, but that doesn't mean it would dial-up itself without your knowledge.

So we have to imagine there was a particularly nasty piece of spyware installed on your system. Is there no depths the cyber-scum won't trawl ???

 

Stupid question time but redial if line is dropped isn't ticked is it?