Advice please

melbury

After posting on here a few months ago asking how to get the "tick" on the remember me on this computer to go away it now has, but I am a bit concerned.

Yesterday afternoon computer had a strange turn and to cut a long story short I had to just pull the plug out because it wouldn't let me close anything down.

Since it restarted the automatic log in for my email has gone and I now have to type all the information in again.

Although I am pleased about this, a few months ago there was nothing I could do to get rid of it so that I would have to type it in.

What do you think could have happened? Has my computer been taken over?

It is all very strange and things like this really worry me.:eek:

fwor

It's hard to see how the two events could be directly related, but you don't tell us enough to say with any great certainty - we don't know what version of Windows you have or what email client you use (or if you use webmail, what browser you use).

Given that you had to pull the plug while it was running (is it fair to assume that even Alt+Ctrl+Del did not bring up the task manager, from where you could have shut it down?), the filesystem may well be corrupt (i.e. the contents of the hard disk may not be in a consistent state).

You can check if it has problems by opening a Command Prompt window and typing "chkdsk c:". That should show if there are problems, and typing "chkdsk c: /f" will try to fix them next time you start the PC up.

I should add that, while it is imprtant to fix any filesystem corruption, it's highly unlikely that this is the reason for the change of email behaviour...

penrhyn

Is your Antivirus/antimalware software up to date?
Have you performed an Antivirus scan and an Antimalware scan?
Have you installed the latest windows updates?

melbury

Thank you both for your replies. I did press ctrl+alt+del and got the task manager, but it wouldn't do anything, just seemed frozen.

Strangely it seemed to open up my very old email account that I haven't used for years in Outlook Express, which had a couple of thousand rubbish messages in. I stopped using this account because I kept getting inundated with hundreds of rubbish emails.

I now have an email account with Orange which I access from their home page and this is the one that has changed.

I have got up to date internet security - Kaspersky - and did run a full scan immediately after this happened.

I get really scared about using online banking etc when something like this happens.

fwor

melbury wrote: »

I now have an email account with Orange which I access from their home page and this is the one that has changed.

Ok - that probably explains it. If you are accessing it via a browser, there are two separate ways in which your logon details get "remembered". One is the "remember me" tick box which instructs the website to set a cookie on your PC so that the website can recognise you.

The other way is that the browser itself can "remember" your login details and automatically fill in the account and password details. Where you turn this on and off depends on which browser you use - in Firefox it's in Edit, Preferences, Security and un-tick the "remember passwords" box.

macman

OP, don't ever pull the mains plug to shut down your PC. If it won't shut down via the Start menu, then use the 'power on' button (just hold it down for a few seconds and the PC will shut down). Pulling the mains plug or switch will shorten the life of your hard drive, and is likely to corrupt your OS.

bskelhorn_2

One thing you can do to make sure your pc doesn't remember anything you don't want it to, is to download CC-cleaner. This free download will clean your pc of any temp files both local and from the internet.

Also it cleans up any registry problems you may have. I have been using for ages and its really handy. Just google cc-cleaner and follow the download instructions.