Author Topic: Computer problem= Help Requested.  (Read 24491 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline dracnal

  • Posts: 1696
Re: Computer problem= Help Requested.
« Reply #550: September 14, 2020, 12:49:36 PM »
**NOTE: The links and software below are good and valid as of 9/14/2020. While they will likely be good for some time, I don't have any control of them, nor am I affiliated with them, so I can't guarantee they will be good in the future. Please open a new post if you have computer questions or issues, just to be safe.

So check to see if there are any Windows updates available and then run your antivirus (I use Windows Defender);

Click on the Windows logo in the lower left corner
Click on the wheel with the cogs - Settings
Scroll to the bottom and click on Update & Security
Click on Check for Updates

After any updates are installed you may or may not have to restart.  Once that's done run your antivirus.

This is all good advice. With Edge and Chrome it likely isnt the browser but could be a protocol issue an update will fix. To get a good scan with a third party tool it may be worth using rkill first. It  doesnt clean anything but kills known malware processes it finds running. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/rkill/ - the download from bleepingcomputer itself will work fine. When that finishes, it will pop up a window saying what it did. Don't worry about the info - just know that if you haven't seen a window yet, it's still running.

Once it's finished running, go to https://www.malwarebytes.com/mwb-download/thankyou/ and download the program. Both rkill and mbam will prompt you to save the download without clicking on anything. If it doesn't show up after ten seconds, then you can click on the 'if your download didn't start, click here' thing, but don't click any other videos, advertisements, download buttons, etc. They're most likely going to be leading to advertising at best, annoying greyware junk that will slow your computer at worst.

With malwarebytes, you don't need to give them your credit card or create an account or sign up for the premium trial. Just look for 'no thanks,' 'free is good,' type of responses on any window. MBAM will update to the latest definitions when you start it and then just hit 'scan now' and let it run. When it finishes, you can see the list of things it found. It will almost certainly find things, but most of them are more annoying than malicious. Anything listed as a PUP should be cleaned but isn't a threat. It's just something someone is using to harvest marketing data from your computer to make themselves richer at the expense of slowing your machine down a tick.

Anything listed as Trojan is absolutely a threat and you should write down which ones, if any, were found and post them here.

That's a fair amount of info and steps in one post, so I'll stop here if you have any questions; that helps keep it from getting really confusing.