tschrock

I found some posts online about a new spyware threat called spywarebot. It looks like it could be a spy falcon / spy sheriff / spyware quake variant - I think. I have not had the chance to infect our test system with it yet, so I thought I would ask if any of you have been hit with this or know someone who has been.

;( There is a nifty little scam going on where unsuspecting consumers install MediaPass software on their computer hoping to download music and video files. Except when they agree to install the software, they are also agreeing to allow MoviePass to use their computer's hard drive and internet connection bandwidth for their purposes. Oh, and they also make you agree that they can sell your personal information to their affiliates - of course. With that aside, when you install the MoviePass software, you are installing a free trial. Again, in that nasty little terms of service agreement you agree that if you do not cancel your trial BEFORE it expires, that you will pay them $29.99 a month for their service. Once the trial expires, a box will start popping up on your screen, increasing in frequency over time, asking you for your billing information. If you remove the software and just forget about it, you are caught in yet another clause in their TOS that states that if you do not immediately provide your billing information, they will bill you for an entire year of service (a $359.88 tab) and then turn you over to a collection agency. The only way to stop this cycle (easily) is to cancel your subscription immediately unless you intent to subscribe to their services. To do this you MUST call their toll-free number. After all of that I have to say it is pretty crappy that this scam is actually working on people. If you have any influence over the general public (or at least your local LAN), let people know about this shady operation. Most importantly, DO NOT remove the MoviePass software before you call to cancel the account they have open for you (yes, if you have the MoviePass pop-ups, they have an account for you). They will require a number from their software to deactivate your account. Once you have killed your account, you can remove their software to stop those annoying pop-ups. We have sent a press release to our local media outlets and made it available on our homepage. If you want more info on MoviePass or the MediaPipe software, visit www.moviepass.tv.

The people behind MoviePass have bottled up their software under a new name - popcorn.net. Popcorn.net is just as hard to remove as moviepass, but luckily all of the file names are almost identical. They dropped the mediaPipe name and replaced it with the more generic Download Manager.

I was researching the latest variant to remove MoviePass for one of my customers. I went to their website and read the terms of service (I had looked at them a few months ago) and they changed! They took down their toll-free number and created a subscription cancellation page. They didn't even make it a link, so you have to copy and paste it into your browser window. Then if you have a clean system it tells you access is denied, and asks you to reinstall MoviePass! If you have an infected system, it lets you in. Whatever you do, do not reinstall MoviePass. You don't have to pay these people a dime. Remove Moviepass and then report these jerks to the FTC!!! This is such a SCAM!

NAV and NIS both dig deep into your system's registry and hidden system files when they are installed. To see what I mean, click on start and then type regedit and press enter. click on My Computer and then click on edit and search. Search for syman and look at the HUNDREDS of keys that come up. (If you decide to try to delete them, be sure you back up your registry first) Rather than just ripping the guts out, Symantec provides a few tools that can completely remove Symantec Norton Antivirus and Symantec Norton Personal Firewall (NIS). You can search the Symantec website for the SYMNRT tool, or you can read our free online tutorial. Either way, I like Symantec products, but I have to disagree with their "award winning support". Its kind of like Iran giving you a human rights award.

Good question. From what I can tell, the Movie Pass people just intimidate you into paying. Some people have told me they called and gave their personal information. WHATEVER you do, if you have this on your computer, DO NOT give them any additional personal information!!! It seems like a big DUH, but I had a customer do that very thing yesterday.

What file is missing? If it is the same file every time your could copy that one file to a floppy or the laptop's hard drove and then point it there when it pops up the error message.

Does the camera not install in 2000/XP, or does it just not work with the software that came with it? If it will install but the software will not work, you could try Windows XP compatibility mode.

From what I can tell, it seems to look good. Are you sure that is a 56x DVD-ROM and not a CD-ROM? Also, what motherboard and processor are your using? I would recommend AMD's 64-bit processors. They are very flexible and powerful.

I have seen over 30 people in the past 3 days that have had this problem. Their entire system32/config folder is missing and they can't log into their profiles via the XP recovery console to attempt to fix it. We have no idea what is causing this, but we have developed a backup batch file that will backup your config folder so *if* you ever get hit (or hit again) with this problem, you can easily have a full recovery. Read the tutorial that explains how to use the backup utilityand how to restore your backup in the event of a crash. Good luck!

From my experience, you may not have a large enough power supply to power your computer. You have at least 4 drives (3 DVDs and a Hard Drive) plus USB devices. You should use an online power supply calculator to determine the amount of wattage your system will require to power all of your devices. Based on the information you gave provided above, I was able to determine that you would need at least a 338 Watt power supply, and that does not include any USB devices. There is no program that will tell you how many watts your power supply kicks out. You have to open your computer and look at the output on the sticker on the side of the power supply. Most big box computers only come with a 250 Watt supply. If this is the case, and you have added drives and cards over time, it would explain your problem. Your computer is "freezing" sometimes randomly, but most of the time when the hard drive is being used in conjunction with your network connection. I honestly think if you check, you will find your power supply is not sufficient. I would recommend that you upgrade to at least a 400 Watt power supply. If you add RAM memory without increasing the wattage of the power supply, you will only make matters worse.

http://www.ntcompatible.com/thread9295-1.html Check out this previous post. It may be helpful.

I found these pictures on my hard drive and I thought you all might enjoy taking a look at them. This hard drive died, and one of my customers asked me what we did with the dead drives. I told him target practice, and he laughed. But I was serious! See for yourself! http://www.thorschrock.com/deaddrive.php

Make sure you are installing the V4 drivers for your Linksys card. Using the wrong version number will allow limited functionality, but can cause unpredictable problems. Also, when you do what Relic said make sure you go to the linksys website and get the most recent LINKSYS driver. If you are relying on Windows Update for the updated driver, don't. They are especially troublesome when it comes to NVIDIA video drivers.

Glad to see you have it working! Before you use the old drive again, make sure you run a chkdsk /r on it to make sure it doesn't have any bad sectors.

You should also look into AsRock motherboards. I don't know what genius came up with that name, but the boards are solid. They are a generic white-box version of the Asus motherboard. Same high quality board, but a LOT cheaper without the ASUS brand name on it.

For most of today's computers, 250 Watts doesn't cut it anymore. Also, as power supplies age, their output tends to decrease gradually. To troubleshoot this problem, I would suggest 2 possible solutions. First, disconnect the power cord from your PC for about 10 minutes. Then, plug your PC back in, but make certain it is plugged directly into the wall - no surge protector (just for testing). If the computer powers up ok, then shut it down and include the surge protector. If it still powers up ok, it needed a power cycle, and should work fine for a while longer. The second suggestion would be for you to go to a big box store like Best Buy and buy a new ATX power supply (300 Watts or greater) and replace your old one with the new one. f it works, problem solved. If it doesn't, then return the power supply to the box store and tell them you needed an AT power supply and this one wouldn't work for what you needed. No matter how you get your system working again, you might consider using a Power Supply Calculator to determine how much wattage your system really needs before you buy a new supply.

Does your hard drive happen to be SATA (Serial ATA) instead of the standard 80-pin IDE drive?

As long as you use a boot disk from an NT-base file system you should be able to fix the problem. If your boot disk is failing and you do not have the original bootable CD from your operating system, you can create a 6-disk boot disk set to get your system booted to the recovery console. I don't have too much experience in NT, but XP is built on the NTFS file system, and under the hood has a lot of NT systems. Once you have successfully booted to the recovery console, you might also run a chkdsk /r command to test and repair any defective areas on your hard drive.

Does your keyboard work when you boot into Safe Mode? Restart your PC and then start pressing F8 as soon as you press the power button. Soon, a menu should appear from which you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to select Safe Mode. If your keyboard works here, it could be a keyboard driver issue (especially if you have installed a specialized keyboard in the past). If your keyboard works in Safe Mode, open your control panels and click open the system control panel. Click on the hardware tab and then click on the device manager button. This should open your computer's device manager. There should be an alphabetical list of every device installed on your PC. One of the selections should be "keyboard." Click on the plus sign next to it and remove all installed keyboards. Restart your PC to exit Safe Mode and your computer should automatically reinstall your current keyboard using the appropriate drivers. Now, the keyboard should work in normal mode. Post back here after you have tried this so we can know how it went for you.

It sounds like you are getting a Blue Screen error that is causing the computer to immediately reboot as soon as it processes a system device. Since you can't get into Safe Mode you will need to disable the automatic system restart so the blue screen stays on the screen long enough for you to read the message and post if back here. Start your computer and start pressing F8 as soon as you pres the power button - just like you are going into Safe Mode. But instead of selecting Safe Mode from the menu, select "Disable Automatic Restart". Your computer will continue to attempt to boot into normal mode. Except this time, you should see a blue screen with an error message formatted like 0x000002d or something to that effect. Please follow the procedure above and then post the blue screen error message here.

I have seen this happen in Microsoft Outlook too. In Outlook we found the cause to be that the font file that Outlook was trying to use to display the message text was missing or corrupt (in Outlook's case it was arial). You might try a font transplant from a working PC with Incredimail installed to the damaged PC. Copy all of the fonts from the good PC to a CD, then dump them into the fonts folder of the damaged PC.

It definitely sounds like you have a problem with your hard drive. For the sake of this post, I will assume you are running Windows XP/2000. If you are running 9x, please post back here again and we can provide you with a different solution. First, you need to get your hard drive cleaned up, and to properly do this you will need a boot CD or a set of boot disks. If you do not have your Windows XP CD, then click the preceeding link to make a 6-disk boot disk set. To create the boot disk set, download the boot disk creator program that is intended for your Windows Operating System and save it to your hard drive. Double click on it to run it and follow the on-screen directions. Once you have a Windows XP/2000 CD or boot disk set handy, you need to boot your computer from it (not from the hard drive). Once your computer is booted fully you need to run a "chkdsk /r" (without the quotes) command. This will take a while depending on the size of your hard drive and you should not lose any files through this process. This scan will search your hard drive for problems and repair what it finds. Once the scan is done, reboot your computer and it should work fine. If not, then you may consider taking your hard drive into a local company to have the data backed up to CDs.

First you need to turn off automatic restart so you can get the details of the error message. To do this, pres F8 while booting your PC. Select 'Disable Automatic Restart" from the menu. You will still get the error, but you will be able to read it. Next, you need to Google the error. This will tell you whats going on. You could also try running a chkdsk to make certain your hard drive is functioning properly. If the hard drive checks out ok, post back here and we can help you from there.

You really, really need more RAM. Seriously, an upgrade to 256 or even 512 is less than $50 anymore. You can easily install it yourself. If you doubt your abilities click here to see a tutorial. It is easy as pie, and not expensive at all. Windows XP requires 128 just to run XP. Your Norton is demanding another 32 MB, so you are running on virtual memory as soon as you are fully booted!