Lexington Computer Repair Blog

What we have noticed over the last year or so is that the virus writers are making their viruses more and more difficult to extract. We have found that no single virus removal program can do the complete job. Moreover, the virus writers are making it so that an average user often cannot even get the computer booted into a state where they can start to work on it. If you want to give it a go, here are my suggestions.

Required items:

• 1 working computer (not the virused one)
• 1 flash drive

First, recognise that the bad guys have got control of your computer. They essentially are controlling it remotely over the internet so you need to make sure your computer is disconnected from the web. Pull the ethernet cable out of the back if you are connected by a wire. If you are wireless, you need to disable your wireless connection with a switch or button combination (if you are on a laptop) or, if you are on a desktop, by pulling the antenna off or pulling the card (NB: turning off your wireless router will not work as many viruses configure your computer to attach to any network they can find, like your neighbors).

Once the computer is off the internet, turn in on and see if you can boot into Safe Mode. To do this, start pressing and releasing the F8 key about twice a second as soon as you turn the power on to your computer. If you get it right, a text menu, white on black, will appear. If the Windows start screen appears, turn off the computer and try again. From the menu, select “Safe Mode” (no networking). You will see all the device drivers that your computer loads scrolling across your screen. If the computer asks you if you are sure you want to enter Safe Mode, say yes. If the computer seems to stall, give it a few minutes to boot, sometimes Safe Mode takes a while to load. If you are asked to log in, log in with your user name and normal password. If all goes well, you should get a screen with huge icons that looks a little like your desktop. If after 5 minutes you are still stuck on the black and white screen, Safe Mode is not going to work for you.

Once the computer boots into safe mode. Verify that you don’t have any virus pop-ups on your screen. If you do, you may have trouble with the next step but soldier on.

On the working PC, go to www.malwarebytes.org and download Malwarebytes, saving it on your flash drive. Next go to here, and download the latest security definitions for Malwarebytes and save those to your flash drive. Unplug the flash drive from the working computer and plug it into the one with the virus. Use My Computer or Computer or Windows Explorer to find your flash drive, then double-click on the Malwarebytes program to install it.

Proceed with the Malwarebytes installation (some viruses are smart enough to keep you from installing this program, if it won’t install, try changing the name of the file on your flash drive to something random, if that still doesn’t work, you may be beyond the scope of this procedure. When Malwarebytes asks you if you want to update and then run the program, uncheck both boxes (you don’t want to run it yet). After Malwarebytes completes its installation, go back to your flash drive and run the Malwarebytes update program you downloaded. When that completes, go to your desktop and double-click on the red Malwarebytes icon.

When the program opens, select “Perform Quick Scan” and press the Scan button. This will take 10-30 minutes to complete. When it’s done, review the items it has found (there may be quite a few) and tell it to fix the problems. You may be asked to reboot the computer, if so, answer yes, if not, reboot the computer anyway.

With the computer still physically disconnected from the internet, reboot the computer into “normal” mode. If you can log in to your desktop do a little dance, you are about 1/3 of the way home. Run Malwarebytes again, this time telling it to do a full scan, this will take an hour, maybe more. Again, tell it to fix any problems it finds. After it finishes, open the Control Panel, go to Add/Remove Programs and uninstall any security or antivirus programs you have been using – consider them broken. This is an important step, if you skip it, and proceed with these instructions you may render your computer unusable.

Now, on the working computer, go to www.free-av.com and download Avira AntiVirus and save it on your flash drive. Next, go here and download the Avira signature updates (keep that page handy because you will need the instructions after you install Avira on the virused computer). Move the flash drive to the virused computer and install Avira. Next, following the directions you found above for doing a manual update, update the Avira virus definitions. Now, double-click on the Avira icon on your desktop and tell Avira to do a full scan of your computer. Go fix dinner or a very large cup of coffee, this will take at least and hour.

When Avira finishes, tell it to repair any problems it found. Now, reconnect your computer to the internet. Start Malwarebytes again and go to the Update tab and tell Malwarebytes to do an update. When it finishes, run a Quick Scan and clean up any additional problems it finds. After that, tell Avira to update itself and run another full system scan. When that finishes, there is a 90% probability your computer is clear of viruses and trojans. You might want to download Hitman Pro and run it for a second opinion.

If these instructions fail

There could be a million reasons why the above procedures might fail. As I said, the virus writers are smart and often over-achieve with their destructiveness and stealth capabilities. Here are some good websites with helpful people that you might try:

• Major Geeks
• Broadband Reports
• Wilders Security

Your other options are:

• Save all your importat data to that flash drive and reinstall Windows
• Call a professional like Hartland Computer Services @ 859.536.4107

Good luck.

We’re huge Skype fans here. First we used it for international calling back to the US when we were living in the UK, then we loved it for its great video conferencing when we were in India. I’ve installed it on two Windows 7 implementations (both on the same machine) and have had problems with the sound card both times. Here’s the problem and fix:

Sometimes, when I would answer a call, instead of picking up, Skype would reject the call and give me a message that says: “No sound – There’s a problem with the sound card inside your computer. Try plugging in a USB headset for this call” It does this even though there is absolutely no problem with the sound card. The problem is intermittent but once it starts it’s hard to get rid of.

The solution I’ve found for this is as follows:

1. In Windows 7, right click on the little speaker in the notification area (lower right of desktop)
2. From the menu, select “Playback devices”
3. On the “Sound” window, disable any sound devices that you don’t have or don’t use then select the one you want to use for Skype, it probably is called simply “Speakers” with the name of your sound card underneath it.
4. Now click on “Properties”
5. Next click on the “Advanced” tab
6. Uncheck the box that says “Allow applications ot take exclusive control of this device” then click “Apply”, then “OK”
7. You should now be back at the “Sound” window, click on the tab that says “Recording”. Highlight the microphone that you use for Skype and click on “Properties”
8. Go to the “Advanced” tab and do the same thing you did for “Speakers”
9. From the “Sound” window, do the same thing for the other microphones on your computer
10. Reboot.

This should fix your Skype sound problem. Enjoy.

Customers ask me quite often my advice on what brand of new laptop computer to buy. Personally I favour Thinkpads, I’ve been using them for almost 20 years and I’ve never had one fail me yet. I have 3 of them here in the house that are at least 7 years old and they are still going strong (OK, the X22 has some screen issues but it’s still very serviceable). Generally though I tell people to look for a good deal on a laptop, get one with a dual-core processor and 1 or 2 GB RAM and they should be OK whether it’s Dell or Toshiba or Gateway or whatever Best Buy happens to be selling at the time. I have now added to my advice the following – whatever you do, don’t get an HP laptop. Sure, all manufacturers have some problems and you’ll find no shortage on the internet of pissed-off owners of various kinds of laptops, but in my experience the consistency of problems with HP Pavillion laptops is unequaled.

I’m a small repair shop in a relatively small town. There are probably 30 other computer repair places here in Lexington and maybe 50 if you draw a bigger circle around the “Greater Lexington Area”. I figure I probably do about 10% of the repair business that Geek Squad gets and I’m probably right it the middle for the amount of business the average small repair shop handles. In the last two weeks, I alone have had a dozen, that’s 12, HP Pavillion owners come to me with the exact same problem. Right now here I have 2 DV2000, 2 DV9000, a TX 1000 and a DV6000 Pavillion here for repair. Now that sounds good for me but it’s bad for the owners. All of these computers suffer from the same design flaw that causes them to overheat and burn out the wireless card, the video chip and/or the power distribution chip. In each case, the fix is to replace the system board – a pretty expensive proposition. Now, if my little shop is seeing this many of these machines, many of which are only 2 years old, imagine how many of them are really out there!

Of course HP knows about this problem. To their credit, HP started a recall of these machines, well their term for it was “Limited Service Enhancement Program” a while back. Unfortunately, they didn’t cover all of the machines that appear to suffer from the problem and, I guess because they didn’t name it a “Recall”, the time period to report your machine for a deservedly free repair was limited. So, even if your machine was poorly designed and even if HP know about it, and even if they admitted it had a problem and offered to fix it for you, if you didn’t know about the offer or are a few days “late” in enquiring about it, you’re screwed. Pay them $260 to change the system board or go buy a new computer. That’s not right.

I called HP today on behalf of a customer and spoke over a very bad telephone line to one of HP’s agent’s who must have been in the Phillipines. As best I could tell his name was Debie, maybe it was Randie, it was a very bad line. He told me, “Mr. Hamrin, your machine is out of warranty but was covered under our Limited Service Enhancement Program. Unfortunately though, this extended program ran out in October.” Now, I explained to Debie/Randie that the machine actually had been broken since October, but it took the owner a couple extra weeks to report it (I was calling HP on 18 November). No dice says, Debie/Randie, it’s too late, you should have called in October. You have no recourse. Debie/Randie told me that he was the final authority on this.

Sorry HP, that’s not right. You sold a defective computer, you should fix it, period.

So if you have an HP Pavillion DV 2000, DV 6000, DV 9000, TX 1000, TX 2000 or any other HP Pavillion laptop that is showing any of the following behaviours, call HP at 1 800 HP INVENT right away and ask for a new system board:

• HP Pavillion Wireless card won’t turn on
• HP Pavillion won’t power on
• HP Pavillion graphics freeze

If your computer is either under warranty or just out of warranty, maybe you’ll still be under their program, I hope you are. If you aren’t, my advice is to get your files off your HP and take it as a lesson learned that you should never buy an HP laptop.

Edit (24/2/10): If you would like to get an idea of the scope of this problem and HP’s indifference to it or if you would like some instruction on taking HP to small claims court, go to this excellent HP problems site.

Well, I’ve had my first Windows 7 problem. I did a clean install “upgrade” of a machine to Windows 7 Home Premium, tested the machine and turned it back over to the customer. He called me two days later when he experienced the infamous (Vista) KSOD. He described the symptom this way: the machine was working fine the night before, but when he turned it on in the morning, it came up with the BIOS screen then went straight to a black screen with a blinking cursor. Yikes, I thought, this is too close to Vista for my tastes.

The machine is a Toshiba Qosmio A45-411 laptop. I’m not actually positive that this is strictly a Windows 7 problem. It turns out that the issue has to do with the computer not finding the hard drive after it wakes up from hibernation. To fix the immediate problem, I removed the hard drive from the machine and turned it on. With no hard drive it the machine, it tries to boot from the network (for some reason it skips over the CD drive which is first on the list). After the unsuccessful network boot, I turned off the computer and re-inserted the hard drive. Hit the power switch and it will again try to boot from the network, then, after a moment, will successfully resume using the HDD.

This particular computer had some problems with SATA LPM (Linked Power Mode) which were supposed to be fixed with a BIOS update. I have a suspicion that this is where the problem lies but I don’t have the time right now to fully sort this. My workaround for the problem is to disable hibernation on this machine as the customer is OK with that. You can read about how to disable hibernation in Windows 7 here. If you use the GUI method Brink describes here, there is a setting for disk power that might be interesting to fool with if you have the time.

EDIT: I’ve added another simple solution for the blinking cursor problem that is not Windows 7 specific.