Well, phooey. 'Soon as the computer gets repaired... it gets five gigs of adware on it.
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Seriously, it doesn't have five gigs of crud installed (although the system sure runs like it), but, instead, a little INCREDIBLY annoying virus: the Google Redirect worm.
Well, basically how it works is that whenever you click on a search result of Google/Yahoo/Bing/whatever, the virus scratches its head for a second, deciding weather to let you visit the actual site (rarely) or to redirect you to a shopping/news/search site (most of the time). Plus, of course, it makes your computer lag like crazy.
There are a few solutions around. One I've tried (and failed) is to go to Start, Run, C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and see if there is more than one host listed. If there is, delete 'em all except for "127.0.0.1 localhost". But there were no extra IPs in the file, for me. Another one: a Firefox add-on called "NoRedirect" I downloaded. It worked for an hour, and then it started bouncing me off of the sites I want to visit to shopping sites again.
There are lots 'o programs to counter these things, but opposed to being recommended by many people, they are, by many people, recommended against. I dunno weather I'll be fixing the system by using these things or render the thing totally useless.
The real reason I'm worried is because it's my parent's PC. They'll kill me if I ruin it, so I've gotta be wary of what I do with their machine :/
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