Big XP problems

[sleeepr]

I'm trying to troubleshoot a friends Dell laptop - Centrino/XP with SP2 - has been running very slowly with millions of pop-ups, registry change notices from SpybotSD, etc.

First, I enabled the Windows firewall (was turned off???), checked Belarc for Windows updates - was current until October of '08, Loaded Firefox, so he could get away from IE. Things were working well enough to this point. I then downloaded AdAware successfully, however, when I tried to install, got to the point of asking for language, then just didn't do anything. Couldn't close things out, finally did a restart.

During the shutdown, got another spyware popup, closed it a number of times, finally task manager pops up that it wasn't responding - end task = OK. Second task manager window - end task = worked, had desktop back to normal. Went through the process to restart again (start-shutdown-restart) - desktop went away like usual, logging off/windows shutting down - then then fun started.

Machine cycles between logging on and shutting down, over and over. Had to do a hard shutdown.

When I restarted, it began normally, went as far as desktop wallpaper, then into shutdown/start up cycles again.

Another hard shutdown. Restarted, F8 to safe mode, brought up OS choice (XP Pro), then to safe mode screen, then to regular windows logo and the cycle again, but much more rapidly cycling.

Have I crippled this beast completely?

Thanks for any help.

TA

[cmichael258]

Perhaps not. If you can't even boot into Safe Mode to do anything, you might need to pull the hard drive and connect it to another computer via an adaptor and then scan it for viruses.

[sleeepr]

Thanks for the post. I was wondering...if I can change the boot order and load a linux OS from disc, is there scanning software that runs off linux that I can use, or, are there any online services that can scan the hard drive and eliminate my bugs? Hopefully, we could then boot back into XP and finish cleaning this turkey up. ????

ta

[cmichael258]

I'm not familiar with Linux. Perhaps someone else can answer that.

[chuck4456]

When's the last time he changed his battery?

[mikeL]

Linux won't help you with any spyware bugs, you can take the drive out and slave it to another computer and clean it from there, I would run AV, malwarebytes, and ccleaner once you have it slaved to another computer.

If the drive is too badly trashed, you will want to backup the important files (Docs, Music, etc.) then do a reformat, and clean install.

[EzyStvy]

If you hook the drive up to another machine make sure that machine has a good AV program running