Boot Virus Scanner? Plus Harddrive Advice?

[NAIDANAC A]

Hey guys,

So my dad decided to whore me out and try to turn me into a business and fix peoples computers that are lacking common sense.

I have this computer...and I am guessing it has a crap tonne of viruses...Norton crashes on scan. AVG doesn't really actually scan...same with Avast...they take forever to do anything and basically freeze.

I ran a bootable scan of AVG...and that gets an error and kinda crashes...I mean I could reformat in 5 seconds as this computer literally stalls for 20 minutes when clicking on a different window on a program...but that wasn't my end goal.

Anyone have any advice?


Also, I am going to do a reformat of my computer, can you guys recommend a good 1tb+ harddrive for cheap? I am looking at a bunch from ncix/newegg and I have been out of the computer technology loop since I bought my last computer.
It will probably just be a storage drive, ie my current WDGreen works fine as a storage drive.

 

[Polygon]

Save your time and your customers money. From the sounds of it it's too far gone to clean economically. It's probably bad enough that even if you cleaned it the computer still wouldn't run all that great. I would have already done the clean install.

 

[mcrouch2000]

May not be a virus. Probably bad memory. bad drive. Check the capacitors. They are the tallest items soldered to the board and there should be several together. They are normally near the processor. Do they look like the have dust on top of them? If so board is bad.

 

[Adunaphel]

May not be a virus. Probably bad memory. bad drive. Check the capacitors. They are the tallest items soldered to the board and there should be several together. They are normally near the processor. Do they look like the have dust on top of them? If so board is bad.

I agree, run a memtest on that fucker.

 

[narf]

Great thing about memtest, you start it and look at the results, but the computer does the work on its own. From your new company's point of view you get a lot of work done, but don't have to pay your employees (that's you) to do it.

 

[NAIDANAC A]

So it is definitely a virus. AVG can't remove it, nothing can it seems. I can't actually get into the folders either...they seem to not exist.

I am going to do a fresh reformat of it...but I have to ask her what she wants on it first...no way I am using my thumb drives to store anything.

Also, I am going to do a reformat of my computer, can you guys recommend a good 1tb+ harddrive for cheap? I am looking at a bunch from ncix/newegg and I have been out of the computer technology loop since I bought my last computer.
It will probably just be a storage drive, ie my current WDGreen works fine as a storage drive.

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[Lieutenant47]

Customers always get nervous when their hard drive has to be nuked and paved. Programs and drivers will have to be reinstalled, but you should be able to save most if not all of their data. Desktop, Favorites, Music, Documents, Pictures, etc. Get yourself some external usb ide & sata caddies/adapters. You should be able to remove their hard drive and mount it externally and read/copy the folders off, then after you do the clean install, copy them back into their new user profile. If they use Outlook, Thunderbird or Outlook Express for their email, you can save that and their contact list/addresses too. Bit of work, but goes a long way to keeping the customer happy. If you're REALLY lucky, you'll have a customer who actually has a recent backup (very rare, but it's been known to happen). There are also tools that allow you to extract the product keys for Windows, Office & other programs... making reinstall easier.

Although you can get a fair amount of good advice from this forum, it's really not the best for a computer repair tech. Check out http://www.technibble.com.