Computer Help?!?

[Sheryl]

Hi all - thanks for the additional advice. I was skiing yesterday, and recovering today (From skiing not NYE) . I haven't been on line since I can't get on line from the couch without my laptop.

Wab- your link went to a 404 page for me. Thanks much for the offer of a disk, but I'm going to take it to my IT guys tomorrow and I'm sure they'll be able to restore it for me. I'll pay, but I'd rather pay them than screw around myself. They get a lot of business from our company so the bills they send for my personal problems (!) are usually very reasonable.

Trek - I will check into Firefox after this experience. I was running Semantec's virus protection, but didn't have a firewall. I have a lot to learn. I guess I have just been lucky so far!

Cadaver - I tried the F8 trick, but couldn't even get it to run in Safemode.

CT - Somehow I missed out on that offer from Vaio to build my own restore disks. It was probably some annoying icon on the desktop that I deleted.

Anyway, thanks again, guys. I will let you know how the repair goes.

[cube_rat]

I concur that firefox is a more stable, less exploited browser. Internet Exploder is a piece of cr*p. I removed IE from my desktop and refuse to use it unless my arm is twisted really, really hard.

Sheryl - you're probably better off not restoring your system to a previous date. I did this several times with my old Sony Vaio and really screwed things up, most likely due to MS updates being out of synch.

Ultimately, tools like High Jack This, kicked ass butt and the addition of McAfee (security center, firewall and VScan are worth the money, IMHO) plus a Netgear router which acts as a physical firewall has prevented 98% of garbage infiltrating my system. I did get a virus a few weeks ago from unwittingly clicking on a spam link on a fitness site. Needless to say, the virus didn't last long with a analysis of a High Jack This report. Rebooted in Safe Mode and removed the troublesome .dll files.

I probably have overkill going on, but after spending numerous hours trying to clean registry settings, etc, I learned my lesson. Computer cleaniness is next to godliness

[donheff]

Quote:

Originally Posted by cube_rat I concur that firefox is a more stable, less exploited browser. Internet Exploder is a piece of cr*p. I removed IE from my desktop and refuse to use it unless my arm is twisted really, really hard.

Firefox has a plug in that allows you to open a page in an IE tab for those rare irritating circumstances where something you just have to do only works in IE. Although I would guess it must use the IE engine already on your PC so it wouldn't work if you actually removed IE by the roots.