When I try to reach Google, I get redirected to something called http://localhost. Has someone hacked the mighty search engine, or is my web browser just going nuts?
-- Save the Planet Kill Yourself - motto of the Church of Euthanasia (http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/)
Localhost is your computer. (Local + Host). If you are running Windows, something has modified your hosts file. Either search for your hosts file and wade through thousands of lines of text, or run a good anti spyware program like Ad-Aware from Lavasoft, or Spybot Search & Destroy from 'Safer Networking'.
-- And another motherboard bites the dust!
Dave, meet Conficker. Conficker, meat Dave. (sic) :-/
On 4/10/2009 7:46 PM Allodoxaphobia spake thus:
Hmmm; hope not, but better check anyhow. (Hey, at least I don't use Internet Exploiter, with its big "INFECT ME!" sign.)
-- Save the Planet Kill Yourself - motto of the Church of Euthanasia (http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/)
What AV do you use ? Do you have a firewall ?
Graham
On 4/10/2009 10:17 PM Eeyore spake thus:
No AV (but I'm downloading PC Tools' free program now), and a free firewall that works fine (Sygate).
-- Save the Planet Kill Yourself - motto of the Church of Euthanasia (http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/)
I used to use AVS and had for years, but the latest major revision has become so top-heavy with unwanted 'features', that unless you have the latest top-spec machine, it's use has become intrusive to the point of making the machine run like a dog. Friend of mine who services and builds computers for a living, put me onto Avast! which is another free one much in the vein of the original AVS before they tried to get all clever with it. It has full automatic daily updating of both the virus database *and* the application, and just runs quietly and unobtrusively in the background. Has a total of 7 operational 'modules' to monitor all the things that your computer is involved in (web client, mail client, network client etc) Deals with any virus detected with a large on-screen real-time warning, with all the usual auto-heal and quarantining options, and it's 'advice' as to what to do. A thoroughly good totally free program that I would heartily recommend.
One slightly 'odd' thing is that it talks to you. If you have your sound on, it will suddenly announce
"virus database has been updated"
And so on. Makes you jump the first time you hear it ... :-)
Arfa
Here's an eye chart.
-- Adrian C
On 4/11/2009 2:34 AM Adrian C spake thus:
That's cute, and useful as well.
No, I didn't have any virii; PC Tools found one piece of "adware" which it nuked. The not-being-able-to-reach-Google thing went away shortly after I posted. All is well.
-- Save the Planet Kill Yourself - motto of the Church of Euthanasia (http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/)
On 4/11/2009 2:07 AM Arfa Daily spake thus:
Urk!@!
Thanks for the tip; I ended up getting PC Tools' free AV, which found 1 piece of malware ("adware").
I'm with you; I've turned off the AV's "IntelliGuard" protection, as I really don't need it and don't want to be slowed down. (Let's put it this way; I use a condom while browsing, emailing and posting to Usenet.) The only hitch was that after downloading PC Tools AV, when I went to install it it told me I had to have SP 4 (I'm using W2K Pro), so it was a toss-up between downloading SP4 or downloading Avast!, which itself might require SP4, so I went ahead and got the update from Micro$oft. Everything's once again copacetic.
-- Save the Planet Kill Yourself - motto of the Church of Euthanasia (http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/)
I tried switching from AVG to Avast and ran into problems. With AVG, if you scan for malware and it finds something, it continues scanning and reports its actions at the end of the scan. Avast just stops when it finds something and asks you what to do next. That's fine if you're sitting there watching the machine for hours, but not so fine if you run it overnight. I didn't find Avast any less obtrusive than AVG.
One reason AVG 8.x is a heavy weight is that they added anti-spyware features which were not present in 7.5. AVG 7.5 worked just fine for viruses, but if you wanted to deal with spyware issues, you needed some other program in addition to AVG 7.5. The result was that scanning time for AVG 8.5 increased dramatically, but is about the same as all the others.
AVG 8.x did introduce a truely obnoxious feature called "Safe Search". This results in a large delay in displaying web pages as it looks up every URL on the page. As a plug-in, it can be removed from the browser after installation, but really should be user selectable.
Incidentally, my favorite free cleaup utilites are MalwareBytes and SuperAntiSpyware:
One or both of these should be able to clean out the OP's computah from whatever vermin he's caught.
Yep. It also took me a while to decode the "cool looking" Avast console that's made to look like a car radio.
Ummm... try turning down the volume.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I had always used AVG in conjunction with AdAware, and that had not posed any problem to my machine at all. As far as I was concerned, AVG was for virus detection and cure. That was what it was originally produced for, and in that capacity, it worked very well. Then came the dire warnings that the last "7" version was no longer going to be supported, and an upgrade to v 8. was needed. I wish that I had realised that this wasn't actually going to happen for a long time. The on-screen warnings made it seem imminent. Upgrading to v 8. was the worst thing I ever did with it, and judging by the many many negative comments that appeared on the forums in this regard, an awful lot of other people felt this to be the case also.
When I did the initial installation scan under v 8. , I gave up and aborted it at 13 hours. Also, the update and scan timing is no longer properly valid in the freeware version, such that it goes into update or scan mode, pretty much when it feels like it within a couple of hours either way of the assigned time. This played absolute havoc with my auto backup software, which runs every night at a fixed time. If AVG started a scan or update at the same time, it crashed the backup.
Apart from all of this, the machine started running like a dog in general. When I spoke to my friend who has a computer shop, and used to put AVG on all machines that he built, as standard, he told me that he no longer did so, because of all of the problems in v 8. and was now putting Avast! on them all instead. I immediately removed AVG from my system, and put Avast! on in its place. The machine's speed returned immediately to normal, and I have had no further problems with the backups crashing. Over the few months that I have been using it, it has trapped maybe three malicious incomings, and successfully removed them for me.
As far as it talking to me, I don't have any problem with it doing that, which requires turning down the volume, now I know that it does it, but initially, I had no idea that it talked to you, so the first time it did it, when I was sitting in front of the machine, it took me by surprise, and made me jump ... !
Arfa
I, too, was very disappointed with AVG. I have used them for years. Trying to open email was painfully slow. I finally removed all features except the core and now it seems to be much better behaved. I hope they have learned their lesson on this. Making a program too top heavy is not conducive to sales or happy customers....remember Vista??
cv
I prefered Spybot S&D instead of Ad-Aware.
Yep. I still have customers using AVG 7.5 without incident. Machines that are running slow get downgraded to 7.5. It's really hard complaining about a free product.
There's a slide bar on the bottom of the scan whole computer page. Change it from "Automatic Scan" to "Fast Scan". It's much quicker.
Yep. I noticed. Worse, there's no indication on the screen that it's doing something in the background. I like to leave the task manager running so I have a clue that AVG is doing something. However, my customers don't do this and are complaining about interruptions and slowdowns.
Hmmm... not mine. However, I don't run my backup software from Windoze. I boot a CDROM and do an image backup to another driver or to a data dumpster on the network. Current favorite is Farstone DriveImage Express. However, I"m having problems with it and will probably switch to something else. DriveImage 5.1 turned into a big mess when a restore resulted in a trashed registry and mangled a few other files that were open during the backup. Booting from a CD as in the Express version doesn't have this problem, but it pukes if it finds a bad sector or gets a read error. That's unacceptable and useless for backing up a failing hard disk before it totally dies.
Yep. AVG 8.0 is a major dog. 8.5 is a little easier on the CPU, but not much. Avast is faster, but unless a way is found to scan the hard disk without having it stop every time it finds something, it's useless for overnight scans. PC Mag comparisons:
-- # Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060 # 831-336-2558 jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us # http://802.11junk.com jeffl@cruzio.com # http://www.LearnByDestroying.com AE6KS
Just out of interest, I back up to an external hard drive made by Seagate. The software to perform the auto backup is called Bounceback Express, and came with the drive. I've no idea really whether this is considered a good, bad or even unknown utility, but it has a reasonably intuitive user interface, and seems to do what it says on the can, quietly and unobtrusively, without any further intervention from me. I have had to do one restore from it in all the time I have had it on the machine - probably
4 years now - when my data disk failed. It did this with minimal effort, and completely correctly - as in I've never found a problem with any of the data or applications that I keep on the replaced drive. All in all, Bounceback has never caused me any problems at all, except when it had this thing about crashing, if AVG started one of its (semi) scheduled scans or updates.When this has happened, and I've come down in the morning to find a Bounceback failure message on the screen, I have just gone ahead and re-run the backup with a manual start, and it hasn't complained about other stuff that I've had running, so it did seem to be a problem with compatibility between the two programes, rather than Bounceback wanting the machine to itself when it did the backup. That said, I've not had Bounceback trying to back up the drives at the same time as Avast! is doing it's thing, because on that program, the scheduling works correctly, as it used to on AVG, so I have the times set such that they avoid one another.
Arfa
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