Laptop applications not working properly

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

What makes you think the os is infected?

It is stopping him downloading cleanup programs, which is a classic symptom of malware. See the post of 10pm yesterday. It's not hard to create a boot disk (or USB stick) on another PC and run an AV scan with it. At least that eliminates the problem for little effort and no cost, other than possibly a few pence for a blank CD

I would recommend Avast for your virus checking. I've had good experiences with it over the years.

Go to MS, download the sysinternals suite. In there you will find PROCEXP and PROCEXP64. Procexp is like a task manager on steroids. Run this as admin.

In the Options box make sure Verify Image Signatures is ticked, and directly below is Virus Total click this and tick Check VirusTotal.com, and tick Submit Unknown Executables.

Under View tick Show Processes From All Users. Choose Select Columns, tick Virus total and User Name too

At first glance the most important columns are: Virus Total, and Verified signer.

the Virus Total should be all blue, but if any are red and the count is like 2/68 then in is still probably a safe false positive.

For Verified Signer expect most to be ms, intel. Expect the verifier to be Avira - if you use avira, but you should be able to recognise the verified name with the product. The possible problem ones are '(No signature was present in the subject)', but these still could be good and valid software written by a small developer who did not have the time or resources to get it verified, but often they are rogue.

You can also right click on the highlighted line entry, choose properties, Image tab as this tells you the file location and startup command. If unsure of the file, don't delete, just kill the job via Procexp and rename the extension form say 'file.exe' to 'file.exe.lonestarfan', or better still rename its parent directory from say 'bonjour' to 'bonjour.lonestarfan'

This makes it easy to rename back if all does not work well.

if you still get that popup, in procexp to the right of the binoculars you get a scope sight. click on that sight and keep that mouse button depressed and drag it onto that 0800 number and release the mouse button (drag and drop). It will jump back to procexp but will highlight the line that made to popup appear

This can't handle boot partition viruses, or things that may happens before windows runs. Also it does not detect browser hijacking, a remote proxy configuration, rogue dns, compromised flash, or hijacked web stuff including java, however it is deal with about 95% of problems.

if it is still not working, click start, type msconfig and select it, General tab, select diagnostic startup, reboot, say No if it asks to load anything, and again do the above. Remember to switch msconfig back after all is fixed.

Get rid of mcaffee, even if you paid for it, after all it is not really working that well. Use the free windows a/v instead.

Get Edge working normally by doing the following

“
Press Ctrl+Shift+Escape to open the Windows Task Manager, right-click Microsoft Edge, and select End task.

Right-click the Edge icon in the Taskbar or Start menu and select New InPrivate Window.

Edge opens your home page only, without the tab that generated the virus warning. Browse as you normally would. The next time you open Edge, it will work just fine, whether you open a normal or an InPrivate window.
”
How to keep Microsoft Edge from reopening the previous tabs after a crash