This is really complicated, so please bear with me. I am trying to work on a computer that is extremely compromised. Info on the machine is limited but I really need some help. When I first started on the machine it would not do much of anything. I will boot up (very slowly) Once I get it booted I cannot get to much of anywhere. I am using my internet connection to work on it. The person who owns it uses dail-up and I use DSL. The machine does not have a NIC so I am connecting using USB. He has two hard drives c and d. c is justabout full. When I finally was able to get to the Microsoft site and download the sp4, I rebooted and then tried to install it. It would not do the install with the archive, said there was not enough HD space. (Drive d is practically empty has about 2 gigs of empty space). I tried installing the other way (Without archive). It went well until the installer said "running processes after install". Then it froze on me. I let it stay there for hours but the progress bar did not move any. I do not know what to do now. The machine still boots up but will not get to the internet. It has a virus problem and I have no way of fixing it without tools from the internet. I have run AVG scanner, Ad-Aware, installed "All in one secret maker" to try to block the popups and stuff. I installed Firefox to use so I could get around all the stuff IE was doing, but to no avail, Even when I use Firefox IE still loads all the advertizing pages. Anybody have an idea of any avenues I might take to fix this thing? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
This guy bought the computer used and knew nothing about updating his OS. My guess is it has not been updated at all. Microsoft will not support any SP before sp3 so he cannot update. I removed or quarantined almost 200 instances of Adware and 98 instances of viruses before I did anything else. He has TFThot.exe in his processes and I know that is trouble but I cannot get online to try to use something to get rid of it. By the way, I was able to get online for limited periods of time before I did the sp4 install but now I cannot get the browser to open at all. I uninstalled Firefox because I thought there might be some kind of conflict there. He does not have a windows disk, and when I tired to validate his OS to download windows defender it would not validate. He bought the computer from a school system and it was probably on a LAN.
Any help or ideas will be apprediated greatly. Thanks for a great forum!
This guy bought the computer used and knew nothing about updating his OS. My guess is it has not been updated at all. Microsoft will not support any SP before sp3 so he cannot update. I removed or quarantined almost 200 instances of Adware and 98 instances of viruses before I did anything else. He has TFThot.exe in his processes and I know that is trouble but I cannot get online to try to use something to get rid of it. By the way, I was able to get online for limited periods of time before I did the sp4 install but now I cannot get the browser to open at all. I uninstalled Firefox because I thought there might be some kind of conflict there. He does not have a windows disk, and when I tired to validate his OS to download windows defender it would not validate. He bought the computer from a school system and it was probably on a LAN.
Any help or ideas will be apprediated greatly. Thanks for a great forum!