Fdisk, Format, Reinstal.. do dah do dah.

[thepassenger]

Great, in helping Sadako out with a quickie install of XP-SP2, which he is doing to help out a friend of his sister... my lappy is now infested with 'something'.

AVG killed the fecker off but not before it's removed (corrupted) the XP-SP2 firewall and locked out the Autoupdate features. I'm not going to bother even trying to repair the thing, as well Windows is just so bloody fragile to things like this so I'm sat with SynchToy backing up my documents whilst I plan on rebuilding tomorrow.

Lesson: Never do a favour for someone when it involves finding CD key's on-line.

[pjskel]

Could've still helped him had you a Mac.
Sorry, not laughing at you, but the situation. That's good ole Windows for you. Never stops coming round to bite your arse at any given opportunity.

[thepassenger]

pjskel said:

Could've still helped him had you a Mac.
Sorry, not laughing at you, but the situation. That's good ole Windows for you. Never stops coming round to bite your arse at any given opportunity.

iMac G5 PPC 17" screen, 160Gb HDD. You mean the beast that sat in it's box because I have no room to use it at the momment?

[Bodo]

You could always use a

Show Spoiler

Spoiler

something-resistant Linux for online stuff, which you can install parallel to Windows.

[graham@reading]

Oddly enough I've never ever got anything nasty from a popular crack/key search site not disimilar to AltaVista.

Not even once.

[thepassenger]

graham@reading said:

Oddly enough I've never ever got anything nasty from a popular crack/key search site not disimilar to AltaVista.

Not even once.

A search on there lead me to the site that provided the thing that is now infesting the laptop.

Bodo said:

You could always use a[spoiler]something-resistant Linux for online stuff, which you can install parallel to Windows.

PuTTY > Darkstar (Local)

Darkstar said:

su -
uname -a
Linux darkstar 2.6.16-gentoo-r9 #1 SMP Sun Jul 2 14:41:31 BST 2006 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux

Just because the thing shut down Winupdate and XP-SP2 Firewall doesn't necessarily mean it's actually turned off the REAL firewall

[Graham@Reading]

I've evidently been lucky

[SlidingSideways]

VMWare offer a Browser Appliance image that you can run using their free VMWare Player app.
Saves having to re-boot the machine to go crack hunting (of all descriptions )
I doubt they'll admit it, but it was probably built for just this kind of situation!

[ThePassenger]

Well XP reinstalled. Firefox upgraded to v2, Thunderbird reinstalled (did I backup my e-mail? Did I? Of course not...bah!).

Not to start dragging all the backup data off the server :S

Sadako, you owe me a curry for this agro GRRRR.

[__LEE__]

Can I recommend Craagle for finding keys and cracks.