Aunty Virus 6th April 2010
Mr C via email asks:
Hi Aunty I need your help again. I bought my PC in the UK, its branded by Philips and manufactured by Iqon technologies in Ireland. The hard drive failed completely and was replaced. The original hard drive ran Windows XP home edition and also contained a recovery program to reboot the PC to its original factory settings, however, all that has gone with the old hard drive. I have been informed that I need to contact Iqon or Philips for a recovery disk. Iqon are not contactable and Philips fail to reply to any form of contact. Please can you help?
Aunty Says:
Not much you can do apart from what you have already mentioned Mr C. This is a very common problem these days as PC manufacturers very rarely provide recovery discs with new machines as the onus is on us to create a set. There are a few commercial programs available, such as Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image that will let you create a ‘ghost’ image of your system, but it is a fairly complicated procedure and I haven’t had much success with any of the free ones. However, as long as you keep a regular backup of your personal stuff (i.e. photos and documents) on an external hard disk or USB memory drive, it’s not the end of the world having a computer engineer reinstall Windows and setup all your programs again, and it should only set you back about €60.
Pat via email asks:
Dear Aunty, hope you can you help with a photograph problem? I have only had my laptop just over year and I had Adobe Starter on, but when it was time to renew I found it impossible to download even though I tried constantly. I now have Picasa 3 but I find I have not got the same help with correcting photos, can you help?
Aunty Says:
Hi Pat. If my memory serves me well I think Adobe discontinued their free Album Starter Edition software last summer sometime. I don’t really know any other free photo programs other than Google’s Picasa which I find does pretty well everything I need. If you can’t get on with Picasa then you could try searching www.download.com for any free photo editing programs and give them a try.
Brian from La Marina asks:
Hi Aunty, great column and the first page I turn to every Friday, keep it up! Hope you can help me, after that build up! A while ago I re-installed Spyware Doctor (I know you no longer recommend it, but stay with me on this) Whereas the old freeware version scanned and fixed, the new one will only let you fix if you buy the full product. A few days ago I did a full scan with it and it 'found' a small number of threats identified as 'Trojan.Qhost', which it rated as medium risk. Full scans with AVG9, Superantispyware, Malwarebytes and Spybot all fail to find any threats, so is the Qhost infection just a ploy to get me to buy Spyware Doctor? And if not are the other products flawed? I’m not sure whether it is related or just a coincidence but two days ago all of my media players stopped working and I had to re-install, and yesterday the same happened to my Sopcast. I am using another 'pooter until I receive your advice.
Aunty Says:
Hello Brian. I am always suspicious when supposedly free programs try and lure you off to some payment webpage, I personally feel I’ve been tricked. To be sure you aren’t genuinely infected with the Qhost trojan you can download a small program from Symantec specially designed to target that specific infection. Go to symantec.com and download the program, the rest is fairly self explanatory. I can’t be sure about the media player problem without some more details and symptoms. Let me know how you get on.
Colin via email asks:
Dear Aunty, I have Malwarebytes running on my computer. Recently I have been receiving the following message several times a day: "Malwarbytes anti-malware has successfully blocked malicious IP 62.45.208.14" This is the most common IP number but occasionally there are others. Is it possible for me to find the source of these IP's and prevent then from trying to attack my computer or are they harmless and can be ignored?
Aunty Says:
This IP address belongs to a Dutch company who are well known for their involvement in Spam emails. As long as Malwarebytes is tracking and blocking this you have nothing to worry about. It wouldn’t harm to do a full scan with an updated Malwarebytes, SuperAntiSpyware and AVG9 just to be sure.
Alan via email asks:
Hi Aunty, my homepage is now coming up as imesh.com, how can I delete this to return to my Google homepage?
Aunty Says:
If you go to ‘tools’ ‘internet options’ you will see a box where you can type in whatever webpage you would like to appear when you first go on the internet, it’s a easy as that.
Hi Aunty I need your help again. I bought my PC in the UK, its branded by Philips and manufactured by Iqon technologies in Ireland. The hard drive failed completely and was replaced. The original hard drive ran Windows XP home edition and also contained a recovery program to reboot the PC to its original factory settings, however, all that has gone with the old hard drive. I have been informed that I need to contact Iqon or Philips for a recovery disk. Iqon are not contactable and Philips fail to reply to any form of contact. Please can you help?
Aunty Says:
Not much you can do apart from what you have already mentioned Mr C. This is a very common problem these days as PC manufacturers very rarely provide recovery discs with new machines as the onus is on us to create a set. There are a few commercial programs available, such as Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image that will let you create a ‘ghost’ image of your system, but it is a fairly complicated procedure and I haven’t had much success with any of the free ones. However, as long as you keep a regular backup of your personal stuff (i.e. photos and documents) on an external hard disk or USB memory drive, it’s not the end of the world having a computer engineer reinstall Windows and setup all your programs again, and it should only set you back about €60.
Pat via email asks:
Dear Aunty, hope you can you help with a photograph problem? I have only had my laptop just over year and I had Adobe Starter on, but when it was time to renew I found it impossible to download even though I tried constantly. I now have Picasa 3 but I find I have not got the same help with correcting photos, can you help?
Aunty Says:
Hi Pat. If my memory serves me well I think Adobe discontinued their free Album Starter Edition software last summer sometime. I don’t really know any other free photo programs other than Google’s Picasa which I find does pretty well everything I need. If you can’t get on with Picasa then you could try searching www.download.com for any free photo editing programs and give them a try.
Brian from La Marina asks:
Hi Aunty, great column and the first page I turn to every Friday, keep it up! Hope you can help me, after that build up! A while ago I re-installed Spyware Doctor (I know you no longer recommend it, but stay with me on this) Whereas the old freeware version scanned and fixed, the new one will only let you fix if you buy the full product. A few days ago I did a full scan with it and it 'found' a small number of threats identified as 'Trojan.Qhost', which it rated as medium risk. Full scans with AVG9, Superantispyware, Malwarebytes and Spybot all fail to find any threats, so is the Qhost infection just a ploy to get me to buy Spyware Doctor? And if not are the other products flawed? I’m not sure whether it is related or just a coincidence but two days ago all of my media players stopped working and I had to re-install, and yesterday the same happened to my Sopcast. I am using another 'pooter until I receive your advice.
Aunty Says:
Hello Brian. I am always suspicious when supposedly free programs try and lure you off to some payment webpage, I personally feel I’ve been tricked. To be sure you aren’t genuinely infected with the Qhost trojan you can download a small program from Symantec specially designed to target that specific infection. Go to symantec.com and download the program, the rest is fairly self explanatory. I can’t be sure about the media player problem without some more details and symptoms. Let me know how you get on.
Colin via email asks:
Dear Aunty, I have Malwarebytes running on my computer. Recently I have been receiving the following message several times a day: "Malwarbytes anti-malware has successfully blocked malicious IP 62.45.208.14" This is the most common IP number but occasionally there are others. Is it possible for me to find the source of these IP's and prevent then from trying to attack my computer or are they harmless and can be ignored?
Aunty Says:
This IP address belongs to a Dutch company who are well known for their involvement in Spam emails. As long as Malwarebytes is tracking and blocking this you have nothing to worry about. It wouldn’t harm to do a full scan with an updated Malwarebytes, SuperAntiSpyware and AVG9 just to be sure.
Alan via email asks:
Hi Aunty, my homepage is now coming up as imesh.com, how can I delete this to return to my Google homepage?
Aunty Says:
If you go to ‘tools’ ‘internet options’ you will see a box where you can type in whatever webpage you would like to appear when you first go on the internet, it’s a easy as that.