The other day our friendly neighbors from Alberta were over for Happy Hour and Francis mentioned he could not get Skype to work on his computer. I said I would have a look at it for him so yesterday he brought it over and I started it up. Right away an AVG window popped up saying there was a virus. He said, "ignore it, it happens all the time and I can't do anything about it". I clicked the 'remove' button and nothing happened, AVG would not work. He said his daughter had installed AVG a long time ago but he had never updated it.
I thought I would be the smart guy and uninstall AVG and install MSE, a better product that just works away in the background, updating itself whenever required. Well, I finally got AVG uninstalled and then things got worse, much worse. Windows were popping open everywhere and it would not let me go to the MSE site, putting me on other third party sites instead. I knew better than to let it do this but try as I might, I could not download MSE. I closed the computer before I did any more damage. I was about three feet over my head and the computer was worse than when I started, or at least I thought it was.
Last night I emailed
my friend Rick who is wintering just down the road, asking for help. I hated doing this because it was not his problem or even his neighbor but at this point I had little choice. Rick answered right back that he would be glad to help so we set up a time of 9:30 this morning. I thought it was just going to be a simple matter of downloading and installing MSE but no. As soon as Risk turned it on he knew there were serious problems. He discovered many malware programs that were redirecting search requests. When he tried to install Revo Uninstaller, it would not let him do it. He used some professional tricks and installed Revo which found probably twenty malware programs (all in Russian) which he slowly eliminated.
The ten minute job had now taken almost three hours! Our neighbors are happy, Skype works again and Rick got some mental exercise trying to out think the Russian malware writers. As he was leaving he told me that in his 50 years of doing this both as a hobby and professionally, this was the worst he had ever seen. The computer was completely taken over and was unusable.
Thanks again Rick! I learned a lot from this exercise as well and might be able to get further next time I try to help.