preferred spy remover

[jim milewski]

I downloaded a program and it scans but that is it, tells me I have 75 threats but now it wants my credit card number, what would be a free or reasonably priced program for this task that will scan AND REMOVE....thanks

[Erv Niehaus]

I've had good luck with McAfee.
It will clean up your computer when nothing else will work.

[Wiz Feinberg]

I downloaded a program and it scans but that is it, tells me I have 75 threats but now it wants my credit card number, what would be a free or reasonably priced program for this task that will scan AND REMOVE....thanks

Jim;
What program are you referring to? Who makes it? How do you come to use the scan? What type of threats did it detect (generalize)?

It is not totally uncommon for a major security company to offer a free scan and only report threats, but many will also remove those threats for free as well. Charging for removal, by a reputable company is not a bad thing in itself, but, a lot of fraudulent anti virus programs insinuate themselves into your computer through exploits or trickery. Once onboard they pretend to scan for threats, then display a pre-programmed number of threats found, then "recommend" that you purchase the "full version" of whatever they are hawking - to remove the imaginary threats.

I want to be sure you haven't been victimized by fraudware.

[jim milewski]

the program was AD Aware, you hit the nail on the head observing there are fraud programs out there, that's my problem, which one is the real deal, if I purchase one, is that a yearly thing or do I continue pass a year with their updates. Ad Aware seem to give an option to quarantine but after selecting it the final analysis said I still had 75 threats, isn't deleting better than quarantine anyway? I figured if it had the Cnet seal of approval it was ok, wadda think?

[Wiz Feinberg]

Jim;
Ad-Aware is famous for labeling cookies as threats. The only way to know what threats it is reporting is to read the log it creates after a scan.

Threats that return, and are not harmless cookies, are restored by the Windows XP/Vista System Restore utility. If removing them and rebooting causes them to reappear, turn off System Restore, scan, remove, then reboot and scan again. When all threats have been cleaned you can turn on System Restore.

Did you download Ad-Aware from Lavasoft, or elsewhere?

[jim milewski]

Wiz, I think I down loaded it at lavasoft. I then downloaded spybot and it scanned and removed, scan took quite a while, it removed about twenty or so objects. Then I somehow found this site called Major Geeks (sort of like this forum here, but computers rather than steels), anyway they had a program called Advanced Windows Care and it was a bundle with Registry and malware scans and fixes and that found even more spyware that spybot ignored or whatever. As you mentioned logs there were a lot of them posted at the Major Geeks forum and guys like you and those at Major Geeks can interpret them, they can get pretty long. This stuff is a real challenge and so many conflicting inputs from folks. One spyware that looked inviting was Spyzooka as it claimed 100% removal rate by way of using "robots" online 24/7 actually looking to get infections so as to stay current. I appreciate you taking time with this.

[jim milewski]

Wiz, I turned off system restore, but it says all restores are gone, so how do I maintain creating manual restore points after scans and prevent auto restores. Am I understanding you right in that restoration points are a daily routine or on some sort of scheduler, also the best restore is immediately after a succesful scan and keep that as the master until the next scan

[Wiz Feinberg]

Wiz, I turned off system restore, but it says all restores are gone, so how do I maintain creating manual restore points after scans and prevent auto restores. Am I understanding you right in that restoration points are a daily routine or on some sort of scheduler, also the best restore is immediately after a successful scan and keep that as the master until the next scan

Turning off System Restore flushes out all saved restore points, along with any infections in those backups.

After your computer has been thoroughly cleansed of spyware and virus threats you should re-enable System Restore, then create a new Restore Point. To do this, use this sequence:

Start button
(All) Programs
Accessories
System Tools
System Restore
Create new restore point

Normally, restore points are only created by .msi software installers, or Windows Updates. Pretty much all other restore points need to be created manually.

I suppose someone versed in VBScript could write a scheduled task routine to create daily restore points, but I don't have the knowledge to do that.

I don't worry to much about system restore. The only time I have used it is after a bad Windows Update, or when I installed some experimental software that didn't work out (and I created a manual restore point before installing it).

Instead, I use Acronis True Image to backup everything on my hard drive. If something gets corrupted I just pull a good copy out of the saved images. This just happened yesterday, when Firefox froze up and took Windows with it. After a forced reboot I found my Firefox profile was blank. I closed Firefox, opened an Acronis backup from the day before, navigated to the appropriate directory, found the ini file I needed and copied it over to the working directory. When I restarted Firefox everything was back to normal. The same thing had to be done with NoteTab Pro. Without my drag-able Acronis backups I would had had to rebuild my profiles from scratch.

[jim milewski]

thanks, everything seems to be running ok so I just created a restore point

[Brint Hannay]

Wiz, For the true dunces out here (maybe I'm the only one! ), how does this Acronis thing work? That is, where are these "images" you refer to? In an external hard drive? Or on an Acronis server? If it's neither, how can you "back up your entire hard drive" on that same hard drive?

[Wiz Feinberg]

Wiz, For the true dunces out here (maybe I'm the only one! :( ), how does this Acronis thing work? That is, where are these "images" you refer to? In an external hard drive? Or on an Acronis server? If it's neither, how can you "back up your entire hard drive" on that same hard drive? :?

Brint;
Acronis full disk images are complete snapshots of everything on the backed up disk. If you image your boot drive, everything, including the boot-sector and master boot record, all licenses and activations, all files, all registry entries, etc, will be contained in that image file. You can restore an entire image to the original boot drive, or individual files. You can open the image for viewing the contents, in Windows Explorer.

You choose where you want to save your images, but the destination must be able to contain files measured in tens of gigabytes. My typical full backup image file is about 30 gigabytes. I send them to a Simpletech external USB disk (250 Gb).

In order to restore files all you have to do is keep double-clicking on the files representing the backup date you want to open. Eventually, you will get to the individual folder level and can simply drag out a desired file, or folder and drop it into the working folder from whence it originated. If it involves an open program - close it first, or your dropped file will be overwritten.

Acronis True Image suggests that you burn a bootable recovery CD, using the built-in utility. This is a Linux boot environment that contains the full True Image application, in Linux format. It can be used to search for the drive, or network resource on which the images reside, then select the desired image to restore, by date/time saved. The source drive must be powered on to be visible. The entire operation happens outside of Windows and overwrites the hard drive you choose as the destination. This could be a brand new hard drive. A typical restoration takes about a half hour, or so.

Sometimes, it is necessary to have Windows redetect your "generic volumes" after restoring an image to the boot disk. This is a relatively simple operation that is done in this manner.

• Right-click on My Computer
• Select Properties
• Click on the Hardware tab
• Click on the Device Manager button
  (To make any changes requires Administrator privileges)
• Under "View" check "Show hidden devices"
• Scroll down to "Storage Volumes" and open it by clicking on the + symbol. You will see Generic Volume listed for each hard disk, internal and external, which has previously been detected by Windows.
• Double-click on each Generic Volume and click on Update Driver for each one - or - select Uninstall for each one.
• Next, click F5, to refresh the devices.
• Windows will re-detect the generic volumes that are actually present and will install the generic Windows drivers for them.
• Now reboot the computer and all should be well again.