AOL Questions: starting with, is it loaded with spyware?

[Zak33]

A good friend of mine as been using AOL dial up for years and being happy as a pig in pooh, he stuck with them for broadbean.

He has since then complained of horrific amounts of pop ups, and having tried to join the mammoth online community within IL-2 Forgotten Battles, has had cack pings, dropped connections and pooh cpu overheads.

It transpired than his adoring wife, bored one day, had downloaded Zango, which claimed to offer loads of free exciting games and which filled his pc with trojan "like" software, which totally refused to sod off.

Long story + Zak's scissors = short story.

"Mate, lets do a fresh install"
"OK, I want a new HDD anyway"

He buys new HDD.

I talk him through on the phone, and he's soon in there, partitioning, formating and settin up XP. (/proud friend mode)

He rings to say "right, it's in, and nothing else is, what now?"

I tell him to put the nforce2 drivers in, that I got him to burn to disk, the vid card drivers and to expect the USB to throw up an error message as he wont have USB2 support until SP1 goes in.

He does it, the PC accelerates and he's on the phone ranting about how damn fast it is, how quick load times are, etc.

I get him to run Pifast and compare the time with one of my PC's with similar cpu and he's sorted.

He installs AOL from the disk to get online, knowing the USB modem will only run as a USB 1.? but its fine.

As soon as he logs on, he gets a message telling him his registry is shagged, and he must visit regfix.com!

He ignores it. He then boots down, having put new software in (AOL) and reboots to be told that he now has AOL9.

He runs msconfig to find he has plenty of new overheads inclusing Qtime and loads of other unwanted gear.

BUT he also gets pop ups telling him to visit http://www.pctools.com/registry-mechanic/?ref=googleB and http://www.winregcleaner.com/

Now I gotta ask:

A: Does AOL use static IP's. If so, I see a potential issue.
B: No he didn't have a firewall, as SP2 wasn't in and Zonealarm wasn't remembered, BUT he didnt surf anywhere. SO does anyone know if AOL use advert popups?
C: One of the multitude of popups he got was from what LOOKS like Microsoft. IS it possible that cos its the original XP disk, pre SP1, that one of XP's svchost.exe proggys trying to help?

Cheers guys

[directhex]

A good friend of mine as been using AOL dial up for years and being happy as a pig in pooh, he stuck with them for broadbean.

He has since then complained of horrific amounts of pop ups, and having tried to join the mammoth online community within IL-2 Forgotten Battles, has had cack pings, dropped connections and pooh cpu overheads.

It transpired than his adoring wife, bored one day, had downloaded Zango, which claimed to offer loads of free exciting games and which filled his pc with trojan "like" software, which totally refused to sod off.

Long story + Zak's scissors = short story.

"Mate, lets do a fresh install"
"OK, I want a new HDD anyway"

He buys new HDD.

I talk him through on the phone, and he's soon in there, partitioning, formating and settin up XP. (/proud friend mode)

He rings to say "right, it's in, and nothing else is, what now?"

I tell him to put the nforce2 drivers in, that I got him to burn to disk, the vid card drivers and to expect the USB to throw up an error message as he wont have USB2 support until SP1 goes in.

He does it, the PC accelerates and he's on the phone ranting about how damn fast it is, how quick load times are, etc.

I get him to run Pifast and compare the time with one of my PC's with similar cpu and he's sorted.

He installs AOL from the disk to get online, knowing the USB modem will only run as a USB 1.? but its fine.

As soon as he logs on, he gets a message telling him his registry is shagged, and he must visit regfix.com!

He ignores it. He then boots down, having put new software in (AOL) and reboots to be told that he now has AOL9.

He runs msconfig to find he has plenty of new overheads inclusing Qtime and loads of other unwanted gear.

BUT he also gets pop ups telling him to visit http://www.pctools.com/registry-mechanic/?ref=googleB and http://www.winregcleaner.com/

Now I gotta ask:

A: Does AOL use static IP's. If so, I see a potential issue.
B: No he didn't have a firewall, as SP2 wasn't in and Zonealarm wasn't remembered, BUT he didnt surf anywhere. SO does anyone know if AOL use advert popups?
C: One of the multitude of popups he got was from what LOOKS like Microsoft. IS it possible that cos its the original XP disk, pre SP1, that one of XP's svchost.exe proggys trying to help?

Cheers guys

takes less than 5 minutes connected to the web (i.e. not going anywhere, just being connected) with non-sp1 xp to get infected with things

[Zak33]

blimey....really?

how?

[Zak33]

can someone link me to a SP1 download that he can do BEFORE he reinstalls...burn to disk and then put straight in after a fresh install?
Or would a short term install of ZOnealrm be ok pre SP2?

[jon bda]

Tell him to get a modem/router as well...avoids having to install all the carp AOHELL software iirc...

[Zak33]

was wondering about a router..I have one I could lend him to see

[TheAnimus]

RPC exploit.

really simple, when reloading, turn on the firewall, BEFORE plugging in the network cable.

[megah0]

Zakky,

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

http://www.nliteos.com/

Combine the two and he should be good to go, it'll slipstream SP2 onto his install disc.

[scotty6435]

Never connect up the PC to the net before you've at least got windows firewall active, it's not really needed after all! Just managed to get my parents off AOL and onto my broadband connection but mum's still got issues with NOT dialing in! GRR