AVG to the RESCUE – Not.

Another computer infected with a virus. And what was the antivirus of choice?  AVG.  I’m not sure if it is just because it’s so popular or because it’s truly bad. Either way, I will never use nor recommend it.

Poor guy came through RDU airport and thought he was connecting to the public wifi. What did he ACTUALLY connect to?  A peer-to-peer network. Ouch.  Apparently the computer started going crazy. And well it should have.  He tried to bring it up and couldn’t even get it to boot after he got to his family that he was coming to visit.

Thankfully, they found me on the web! This IS good for something!  I pulled the drive and scanned it for a few hours with one program. Removed just one virus.  Scanned it with another couple antispyware programs – removed SEVERAL on each run.  Scanned with another antivirus program that caught 4 or so.

Felt like it was finally time to put the hard drive back in… And voila!  It booted! Mmm… but decided it had no idea how to launch an application.  Huh.  I had seen this before.  It couldn’t find rundll32.exe either.  But it WAS there.

Long story short, after setting up a thumb drive to boot the netbook to do a reinstall – maybe I should see what it’s actually associating the exe files with… Aha. There’s the problem. And a quick expand of rundll32 later, we had action.  And with a few more scans and startup edits, we had computer!  With all the scanning – how long did it take?  About 20 hours.  Never ever sit down to a computer thinking, “I’ll just take care of this real quick…”