How to recover a WinXP netbook that has a lot of viruses without reformat?

Possible Duplicate:
What to do if my computer is infected by a virus or a malware?

My uncle has a lot of viruses on his netbook. I think you know how he got them.

Anyway, my job is to rid them and restart everything from fresh. He doesn't have any important stuff he wants, so I could reformat but nobody has installation disc (the netbook doesn't have a disc drive either). So far... I can't open a web browser without it crashing, what do I do?

meiryo

Posted 2011-05-06T12:32:19.113

Reputation: 723

– DMA57361 – 2011-05-06T12:45:45.467

In fact, it's not just related, it's a dupe and the linked question is a really good community FAQ post that addresses this very well already. I'm closing this. – DMA57361 – 2011-05-06T12:47:58.477

Answers

You'll probably save yourself a whole lot of pain and wasted time by doing a re-install. You can most likely buy a USB DVD drive or boot from USB key - either way, you'll have to obtain the OS media somewhere.

If you really don't want to go down that road, you could start with installing malwarebytes (malwarebytes.org) and see if it can sort out some of your issues. You can download a copy to a usb key on another machine and then install it. I recommend running this once and getting latest updates. Then boot into safe mode and rerun it until it shows up clear.

But as I said, you'll likely invest the least amount of time by doing a reinstall.

barryj

Posted 2011-05-06T12:32:19.113

Reputation: 759

Thanks for the suggestion but I have neither of those... how do I download something without a browser? (i.e. with command prompt). But I'll try to boot to safe mode first and try that. – meiryo – 2011-05-06T12:52:19.947

I'd suggest you download what you need on another machine, and copy via usb key. If the machine is already badly compromised and no browser works, you may have a hard time trying to download anything directly on that machine. – barryj – 2011-05-06T12:58:07.450

Well... You could run a full scan with Avast, Ad-Aware and Spybot. If you have a Windows 7 license I'd suggest you format and install W7 from a USB drive instead (just drag and drop the setup files from a W7 dvd to a bootable usb-drive/stick). Installing XP from USB is a bit more finicky, but also an option

Tzarium

Posted 2011-05-06T12:32:19.113

Reputation: 811

Create a bootable USB from one of the rescue disks out there such as this one (includes clamav antivrus) and scan your netbook offline.

Tog

Posted 2011-05-06T12:32:19.113

Reputation: 4 747