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Rath, I am guessing you are software. Mr. VA is hardware. Are you suggesting going back so far that the virus is not there? Every once in a while we delete everything that is not necessary. Pictures take up an enormous amount of space. My computer has gotten slow several times when I am on city-data. I run a virus check and there is always a tracking cookie. Once I had 17 tracking cookies. They are not dangerous, but they really slow down the computer. I now do a virus check right after being on here and rid myself of these things.
Yes... I'm mostly software... but I work on whatever's broken. Unfortunately, the government has me in a one-deep position, so I only have friends to ask for help (and only if they have a clearance! lol).
The important thing to remember is that tracking cookies are NOT viruses. Not by definition, but a little in the way they work. Remember, a virus is something malicious that is intended to harm your computer or software in some way. Tracking cookies are designed NOT to harm your computer and just track where you go and what sites you visit. In that way, certain banners are placed up for recent sites.
An example of this is you go to Yahoo for the first time. The ad banners you get are really random. But, if you go to several car sites over a period of time, you will notice that many of the banners on Yahoo will relate to cars, car sites, deals with cars, etc. They (tracking cookies) work best when they don't hamper the performance of your computer so that they continue to track where you go without being noticed (and subsequently deleted, quarantined, or ignored). But, since they work so well, many companies used them to get you to their site. That's how you can easily end up with over 300 tracking cookies in a month depending on how many sites you go to.
You should ideally have 1) a firewall, 2) a good anti-virus program installed and active - and run it manually at least once a week, and 3) a good ad-cookie tracking program (Ad-Aware and Spybot are two free, reliable ones, but there may be others out there). Again, these ad-tracking catchers need to be run manually, they don't automatically find tracking cookies.
Are you suggesting going back so far that the virus is not there?
Sorry.. didn't answer this question.
I would say unless they can establish it's a virus (by running an updated anti-virus program), that she go back far enough just to get the things they accidentally deleted that they didn't want deleted. Then, run the virus scan again. If it's not caught after the system restore, they should be good (until the next virus comes along! )
Jeannie - something to note. You can set the periodicity of the System Restore function. If you say "once a week" then you know you will never loose more than one week's information if you ever have to go back and do the restore.
Thank you Steve. The restoration process was successful, thank you. There is a screen that keeps popping up that says my computer is infected. Then, accidently this anitvirus pro 2009 got downloaded and it won't delete. Another thing that keeps happening is this bogus google keeps coming up and when you do a search for something, all these bizarre sites come up instead. I'm probably not making much sense. I need to become smarter with this computer stuff.
oops, one more thing. Somehow our Norton got deleted and when we tried to download again, something is preventing it from getting downloaded, I guess the virus?
jeannie I had something similar last week and it was a "virus threat pop-up"-I couldn't get rid of it. I set my AVG viruse to do complete scans from 2-3:30AM as it was popping up in the morning saying "fake virus alert-threat". The only thing different I did was visit a forum called [domain blocked due to spam] and that's what did it.
Norton is useless from what I understand. The AVG is free and one of the better ones out there.
jeannie I had something similar last week and it was a "virus threat pop-up"-I couldn't get rid of it. I set my AVG viruse to do complete scans from 2-3:30AM as it was popping up in the morning saying "fake virus alert-threat". The only thing different I did was visit a forum called [domain blocked due to spam] and that's what did it.
Norton is useless from what I understand. The AVG is free and one of the better ones out there.
Just do AVG.com I believe. Or a "google"-there's a free one and one that charges-the guy who installed our cable,etc said it's the best. Do the free one.
I can't even get to the site Judi, it won't allow me too.
Failed to Connect
Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at www.avg.com.
Though the site seems valid, the browser was unable to establish a connection.
* Could the site be temporarily unavailable? Try again later.
* Are you unable to browse other sites? Check the computer's network connection.
* Is your computer or network protected by a firewall or proxy? Incorrect settings can interfere with Web browsing.
Jeannie, I hope you got rid of the bugger with all the help you got from Steve and NCN!
I have all my pics on an external hard disk and all the music, DH's games etc on another. I learned putting every darn photo on it after DH deleted about 300 pictures by mistake after deleting each and everything from our pc. Hmmm, that wasn't funny!
Okay, my "go early to bed" didn't work at all. I downloaded a photo calendar design workshop and designed 1 calendar for the in-laws, for my sis-in-law and for my parents. I also want to design 2 photobooks and then order everything to get it printed and delivered before Christmas. The 3 calenders took 3 hours and got my back aching.
Dinner was two slices of w/w bread with sausage.
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There is a screen that keeps popping up that says my computer is infected. Then, accidently this anitvirus pro 2009 got downloaded and it won't delete. Another thing that keeps happening is this bogus google keeps coming up and when you do a search for something, all these bizarre sites come up instead. I'm probably not making much sense. I need to become smarter with this computer stuff. 
