Bringing Ubuntu to the World, One PC at a Time

So a little while back, a co-worker brings in his dads (Ted) computer for me to look at for him. Turns out it is riddled with viruses and spyware and other crud. The worst of these seemed to be some sort of Zlob-Media Codec infections which mess with the start menu (removing just about all the menu items), puts VIRUS ALERT by your system clock, and just plain messes with the registry.

He had an older version of AVG on there, so I tried to do a scan with that, then downloaded the newest version as well as SpyBot Search & Destroy. I was able to pick off a few of viruses through AVG, but at this point it wasn’t 100% updated because I was not about to plug this thing in to my network and let it online. The aggravating thing with that was that SpyBot didn’t seem to want to run until I let it to do an update. Long story short, some of the stuff got detected and dealt with, but now the computer won’t boot up at all. I get some sort of Virtual Device Driver DLL initialization from command.com and that’s about it.

Continue reading →