[dba-Tech] Win 98 problem, possible virus?

Jon Tydda jon at tydda.plus.com
Sun Sep 5 12:23:42 CDT 2004


Hi all, got a problem with my dad's pc.

It's an old Celeron 333 running Win98se. It's plugged into my broadband
connection and has been running at full speed with regularly updated Norman
anti-virus on it, and the freebie Zonealarm firewall. The router also has
the netgear firewall thing on it.

Within the last couple of weeks, he noticed that the internet connection
speed has got slower and slower, until now, it takes over 2 hours to
download a 1 mb file. This is on a 512mb ADSL connection (my pc upstairs is
still fine). This happens whether my pc is turned on or off, and whether or
not there are any other pc's on the network.

We did have a slight problem in that he hasn't got a CD drive, so I had to
find the win98 driver for my memory stick, and now I've managed to get
spybot and ad-aware on it and updated them, run the checks and there's no
spyware on it any more. I've also run the latest version of McAfee stinger,
the one hit virus checker and remover. That came up clean too. However, I
had to uninstall both Norman anti-virus and the remnants of McAfee 4.0 which
hadn't removed themselves completely. I've run a registry cleaning tool and
made the pc a lot faster performance wise, and all the programs still work.
The internet is still slow though, preventing me running windows update and
an online virus scan.

I upgraded the version of Zonealarm on the pc, and now it won't load. I know
the file isn't corrupt because it's he same version that I've put on the
work laptops that use dial up at home.

I copied McAfee 8 from the install cd onto my memory stick - I've installed
it from there before, and from a network folder at work - but every time I
run the installer it locks the pc up and stays hung, I can't do anything
with it... any ideas? I'm stuck now...


Jon




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