Tag Archives: malware

Hpylgr.com

Virus Spyware, , , ,

I had not seen this myself. A friend contacted me and said he had been infected with it. I started doing a little research.

Seems to be adware more than anything. I personally despise adware, viruses and malware. When I see it on my computer I get rid of it and anything associated with it.

The first thing you could try if it hasn’t been on your computer long is to restore your machine to a previous date (before you were infected). Even if you do that I would suggest scanning the machine to make sure.

Rather than duplicate everything that is already out there about it you can check this page for detailed information. They have a lot of details about it and links to all the tools to scan and remove.

Hope it helps.

 

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Zango Spyware

Virus Spyware, , , ,

Windows XP

 

Over the weekend Sept. 8 2008 while working on a machine I ran spybot. It found some adware called Zango. Spybot said it had to reboot to remove some of it and that is where the problem starts. When it reboots you will see
“c:\windows\system32\command.com

The parameter is incorrect.” Clicking it keeps reporting error message over and over. The system never really goes beyond that point.

Took a little research but here is how I corrected it

Log on to the system in safe mode. Start regedit. Navigate to the following registry key and see if there is an entry with “c:\windows\system32\command.com …” in the data portion of the entry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
It had several entries to run Spybot and remove things so I deleted those entries and restarted the machine. Ran Spybot again and undid the changes to that section and it seemed to work fine.

I didn’t do it because it wasn’t my machine but they say you can remove it instructions here.

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Laptop Hard Drive not working

Computer Problems, , , , , ,

Just recently a friend brought a laptop to me because it wouldn’t boot up. When I tried it the machine said there was no hard drive in it.

I was going to pull the hard drive and try it as and external drive on my machine to see it it could be salvaged as they needed some of the data if I could get it back.

When I took the panel off the bottom to remove it the hard drive had come out of the connector. I assume it had been dropped, knocked off the table or something of that sort. I plugged it back in, turned on the machine and it booted up. Since that took care of the first problem I tried a few things and the machine seemed to stop responding. I didn’t know if there was a problem from the initial disconnect of the drive or what. It was acting strange with the anti virus (Avast) so I uninstalled it and scanned for spyware and malware, there were a few so I removed those, then I did an online scan at Trend Micro which said it was clean at which point I downloaded a fresh copy of Avast and installed it.

So now the machine is clean of viruses, spyware and malware but it still kept hanging up, taking a long time to do anything so I looked at what was loading at startup and found there were a lot of things loading. Since I didn’t install the programs I had to determine what was actually needed (my rule of thumb is if it will load when I open the program I don’t need it to be running all the time) so I started disabling startup programs and the machine started working much better.

Most problems end up not being hardware. I don’t work on computers much anymore but the main thing I find when I do is spyware and malware, startup processes, a fragmented hard drive or something along those lines.

Most of the software I use for those things are linked from the anti virus page at http://www.tnt-computer.com/virus.html

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