Virus from Photobucket!...

[rik_uk3]

Or you could hit the reset button to reboot if your not savvy using task manager.

 

[789987]

hijackthis is free and good to install if youve just done a rebuild or know your machine is clean cos you can take all the processes that are running and select them as safe. then anything additional that runs on your machine will be easy to spot.

you can also use it much like task manager to identify where and what is running....

anyway install it and give it a go

 

[ged]

Or you could hit the reset button to reboot if your not savvy using task manager.

Unluckily for users of Windows, its design includes a thing called "the registry". People talk about it in hushed tones, sometimes using mumbo-jumbo phrases that they picked up on forums. In fact the registry is a simple kind of text database (essentially name:value pairs) which stores all manner of settings, snippets of information and whatnot. A sort of computerized broom cupboard if you will. It's almost always a mess.

One of the myriad things that you can do with the registry is tell your computer to start a program at boot time, without the user having to do anything. Oops. The registry can tell the computer to run program B when you ask it to run program A, without even telling you that's what it's doing. Ooops. It can tell your browser to go to SomeRandomCriminalSite instead of Google or YourBank. Oooooops.

This is scary stuff. It should come as no surprise that most malicious software thesedays makes a bee-line for the registry, for example to tell Windows to start the malware running again when the system boots, even if you killed the malicious process using something like the Windows task manager before you shut the machine down. If you were savvy enough to remove the registry entry which restarts the malicious process at boot time, no worries. It just tells your browser to download another copy, run it and put the registry entry back in again, next time you visit Google. And so on and so on. Some of these things have literally dozens of ways of recovering from your attempts to get rid of them, and there are much more pernicious, insidious and downright nasty perversions of the registry.

Tools like MBAM (my previous post), HijackThis (789987's post above) and Ccleaner can amongst other things attempt to sanitize the registry, removing malicious or suspicious entries and probably truckloads of old cruft. As I've said, thee are whole forums devoted to this kind of thing so it would be a lot better to visit those to get a feel for how to use them before you need them in earnest.

A word of caution: messing about with the registry without knowing what you're doing can cause your computer to become unusable. The tools mentioned here should not do things which would cause that, but they are powerful tools and accidents can't be ruled out, especially if you're careless. Help is available online if you do get in a mess but you might need to borrow a computer to get it. Don't be surprised if the computer's owner refuses to lend it to you when you tell him why you need it...

 

[comeonbabylightmyfire]

Another Mac and Linux fan here. Ubuntu is brill, I can use old laptops and make them productive once more. My home firewall is written in Red Hat ten years ago. My old man, in his nineties, had a knackered old laptop and I stuck Ubuntu on there with a few core apps and he's away. Loves it. I'm on Snow Leopard here at home because my new desktop is a 27 inch iMac. Sorry if that sounds a bit smug, but I detest M$ Windoze and I've been forced to confront it in the working environment and I can't find a good word to say. As for M$ Office - don't get me started. I do feel for those of you having malware grief but I can endorse the linux suggestions above.

 

[Corso]

Google image search seems to have an issue with this too - if you select pictures often with a photobucket address the link sends you straigh to one of these scams

 

[Fizzy]

I (try) and run Ubuntu on my netbook. It certainly uses less system resource than Windows 7 that's also on there, but it probably only boots sucessfully 3/5 times. They have a specific one for netbooks, but how can you trust it when they state this:

Introduction

With Ubuntu 10.10 a new desktop called "Unity" was introduced as default for the Ubuntu netbook edition. The new interface should use the small desktop of netbooks more effectively, give a better structured access to the installed application and be more touchscreen-friendly. It is already planned to use Unity as default desktop for Ubuntu 11.04 ([1]).
But there are several reasons to prefer the previous netbook desktop:
• The old netbook desktop used the desktop space of netbooks better than unity. While the old netbook desktop only used a small bar at the top unity introduces an additional sidebar stealing more usable space from maximized applications.
• Unity has a much higher cpu load. The performance needs of Unity often exceeds the power of the netbook-typical Intel Atom processors.
• The new structured access to all installed applications is slower than the previous GNOME starter or GNOME Do.
Fortunately there is an alternative available that restores the previous ubuntu netbook interface which is written in EFL. In the following the installation and switching to Ubuntu Netbook EFL is shown.

So basically they're saying their new Unity desktop 'specifically designed' for netbooks (small screen, low end CPU) doesn't utilise the smaller screen as well as the old non netbook specific version, uses more CPU than your average netbook can throw at it and accesses your apps slower...