Firewall disabling itself
Discussion
Looking for a bit of advice about AV and firewalls.
The computer in question is old (Windoze '98) and has installed McAfee Security Suite 2005 (AV, firewall and other seemingly useless programs) and Ad-aware.
Upon checking the firewall history yesterday I found it to be disabled. I re-installed the entire software package, but still I could not re-enable the firewall. This is when I became suspicious and suspected some sort of virus and decided the best thing (since we use internet banking etc.) was to perform a complete hard disk format and recover. Everything was re-installed, and all seemed fine. Until...
The firewall has just gone and disabled itself again (the McAfee symbol in the taskbar went a black colour so I went to investigate, however it did not go black yesterday, it stayed red (indicating it is working), and I didn't know how long it had been off for.
What I'm trying to work out is whether this is a software issue (but its all a fresh install) or whether there is a virus lurking somewhere. I can't see how there can be a virus, since the hard disk was formatted and then windows re-installed from the recovery CD. The only thing is whenever I perform a recovery (rather to often
) I have to briefly go online without any AV protection to get a windows update that will allow me to then install the McAfee, but I've done this numerous times in the past without problems.
If anyone has any comments or advice they would be greatly appreciated, but in laymans terms please! Hopefully it will not happen again, in which case all is well, but somethings seems a bit wrong. Are there any other free products I should consider to use in conjunction with the above that won't cause chaos? I've read a lot about spybot and other things similar.
Thanks in advance
[don't suppose there is a keyboard shortcut I could have accidently pressed that disables the firewall?]
The computer in question is old (Windoze '98) and has installed McAfee Security Suite 2005 (AV, firewall and other seemingly useless programs) and Ad-aware.
Upon checking the firewall history yesterday I found it to be disabled. I re-installed the entire software package, but still I could not re-enable the firewall. This is when I became suspicious and suspected some sort of virus and decided the best thing (since we use internet banking etc.) was to perform a complete hard disk format and recover. Everything was re-installed, and all seemed fine. Until...
The firewall has just gone and disabled itself again (the McAfee symbol in the taskbar went a black colour so I went to investigate, however it did not go black yesterday, it stayed red (indicating it is working), and I didn't know how long it had been off for.
What I'm trying to work out is whether this is a software issue (but its all a fresh install) or whether there is a virus lurking somewhere. I can't see how there can be a virus, since the hard disk was formatted and then windows re-installed from the recovery CD. The only thing is whenever I perform a recovery (rather to often
) I have to briefly go online without any AV protection to get a windows update that will allow me to then install the McAfee, but I've done this numerous times in the past without problems. If anyone has any comments or advice they would be greatly appreciated, but in laymans terms please! Hopefully it will not happen again, in which case all is well, but somethings seems a bit wrong. Are there any other free products I should consider to use in conjunction with the above that won't cause chaos? I've read a lot about spybot and other things similar.
Thanks in advance
[don't suppose there is a keyboard shortcut I could have accidently pressed that disables the firewall?]
Your running an Operating system which is 7 years out of date and is not supported my MS. You may well get what you have running again, but problems will be back time and time again.I would wager the PC is also as old and bite the bullet and replace the machine with something newer, available from ebay from £50-£100 running XP. Then you can use either the inbuilt SP2 firewall or a decent free copy of Zonealarm, both of which are dependable.
Sorry for the seemingly negative advice, but after spending years in the fight against virii, I have long since stopped supporting Win9x machines and my pc life is much easier as a result of it
Sorry for the seemingly negative advice, but after spending years in the fight against virii, I have long since stopped supporting Win9x machines and my pc life is much easier as a result of it
ultimasimon said:
Your running an Operating system which is 7 years out of date and is not supported my MS. You may well get what you have running again, but problems will be back time and time again.I would wager the PC is also as old and bite the bullet and replace the machine with something newer, available from ebay from £50-£100 running XP. Then you can use either the inbuilt SP2 firewall or a decent free copy of Zonealarm, both of which are dependable.
Sorry for the seemingly negative advice, but after spending years in the fight against virii, I have long since stopped supporting Win9x machines and my pc life is much easier as a result of it
On the flip side, there are a great deal less "programmers" writing virii for Win98 machines than XP.. My XP machine has to run SP2, Zonealarm, Adaware and AVG, with pretty much daily updates to keep on top of things. The 98 machine very rarely gets attacked in comparison.
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