*** is wrong with my laptop?

[corksil]

Hey I bought an HP tx2510us laptop about a year ago and it has worked fine until now. I downloaded a file and upon opening it, my screen instantly filled with popups, and multiple messages saying I was infected with viruses and I needed to "scan now/go here/download this/protect my computer with ___ viruschecker" etc etc.

None of the messages were legit, so after carefully closing all of them without opening anything I finally got back to what I was doing. My computer worked normally for another day or so, with only one or two popups coming out of nowhere. I suspect I got a virus or something from that file, but I couldn't find any ad-ware or mal-ware in my programs list.

Today I turn on my computer and (as soon as I type my password) I see a msgbox that says "unauthorized changes were made to my windows license" and gives me two options: "Learn more online" or "close." If I click close, it logs me back out and sends me to the choose user profile screen.

If I "learn more online" it says I have to re-validate my copy of vista as genuine - then opens IE on the windoze vista page and says it cannot be done and says to try again later. My computer will not respond to ctrl-alt-del, will not load the start menu (the windoze button does nothing either.) I can type [c:/etc] to get into my documents and access the hard drive but I can't run programs or install anything. (I get an error about not enough quota to continue.)

WHAT HAPPENED?? I used to do pc repair and I have never seen anything like this... Plz help!

[bailey]

sounds like you got a bad bug there and it infected your hard drive and OS big time.

you may need to wipe out the drive and start all over with a clean install.

but wait for other replies to this problem.

[juppy]

Originally Posted by corksil I suspect I got a virus or something from that file, but I couldn't find any ad-ware or mal-ware in my programs list.

What did you scan it with? If you haven't already done so, I'd put Malwarebytes on there and do a full scan with that, because most of those "go here/buy this" things are usually knockoffs of something like Antivirus 2008/2009 or Personal Antivirus, which only want you to buy their crappy program so they can get your credit card/bank info. Malwarebytes takes care of a lot of those. If this thing won't let you download Malwarebytes, you might have to DL the complete install package on another computer and burn a CD or use a flash stick to get it to your infected machine. Might also have to run the scan in safe mode (some people do this by default anyway).

[corksil]

Excellent, thanks for the replies. As I suspected, nasty malicious code has over run my box and threatens it's wellbeing.

I was going to try Zone Alarm, but like I said I cannot run any programs. When I try to run anything, I get an error "c:/file_path_of_exe - Cannot process, not enough quota." It's a bizarre msg, "not enough quota to process."

..and and update - I can get the startmenu to show up by opening explorer.exe in the system folder of my HDD. I can't run anything on it tho, because I get that error about insufficient quota. And another weird thing, there's nothing in my control panel. It just says no items in the cascading menu when I open it. Very odd...

About fixing the problem - I understand there's recovery software located on a partition of my hard drive. I understand I can launch it by pressing f11 during startup. But when I push f11, it says 'system recovery' and continues booting as normal. If I hold f11, the computer beeps and hangs. ***!!!!! I can't access the recovery partition from within windoze, so maybe I'm doing something wrong.

thanks for your helps!

[EzyStvy]

Did you GOOGLE the error:
not enough quota to process


Here's one hit that's easy to try:
User Action:
Close some applications and try again. If you still get this message, choose System from Control Panel, then choose Virtual Memory and increase the size of your paging file.

[sgtspector]

It sounds like you had better try to fix this in safe mode. Either that or take the drive out and attach it to another pc and try to clean it that way. Be forewarned though, I just finished cleaning a friends' pc and there are so many files missing and many more are no longer registered I don't know if I will ever get it working without a nuke and pave. Good luck.