WiFi issues and possible hijacked laptop

[mutha_ucka]

Hi, I am trying to diagnose a problem with my friends laptop. It is a Toshiba Satellite P500 with Win7 Home Premium. It will not connect or detect any wifi connections with its own wifi devices. I have looked in device manager and everything appears normal and the wifi/wireless switch on the front is switched on. It has a Realtek wireless NIC in it and I also downloaded and updated the driver. Then I used my own Wireless USB stick at home and as soon as it plugged it in it picked up about 6 wifi connections including mine and it is what I am using right now to type this message. Also I think the computer might be hijacked because when trying to use Firefox all I keep getting for the Google home page is "about:home" and whenever trying to search for something using FF I keep getting a "404 not found". I have used Malwarebytes and it has detected and fixed some stuff but the problem still persists.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Andy

 

[semajjames]

another app to try when you get these sort of problems is "cc cleaner" down load the app and run the reg checker and let it do what it wants ,,, run it over and over again till it finds nothing more to do because for some reason it does not seem to find everything in the first pass

 

[mutha_ucka]

I just tried that and still the same issue? Any other suggestions?

 

[mutha_ucka]

Hi I fixed the 404 not found issue. I did a bit of research and people said to use the program ComboFix and it cleared it right up. However I still can't connect to any networks/internet with the built in wireless devices. The device manager still says they are there and no exclamation marks. But I cannot detect and wireless networks with them nor can I connect to any.

 

[Hughv]

Have you tried Safe Mode?
You could also delete the adapter in Device Manager and reboot to reinstall.
Open Event Viewer and look for related errors.
Never use registry cleaners for this or any other problem. They are unlikely to fix anything, but they may render your machine useless.