Ask Joe

I'm running the Malwarebytes scan and it blocked a torrent website so I'm pretty sure that's what it was. It also detected CodecV under the C drive and OpenCandy, which I think is malware? If anything else turns up I'll post here.

And my AVG hasn't detected anything yet -.- I'm useless with this tech stuff. Is malwarebytes the same as any other security program like AVG/McAfee?

(I apologize in advance for the limited information)
My mother-in-law was over today and mentioned that she was having trouble getting into her email. She uses AOL and can login to the website, but when she clicks on the email icon it pops up with an "Oops, page cannot be found/has moved/etc, etc" page. We tried logging in from my computer to make sure the site wasn't down and it worked just fine. Told her to go home and run CCleaner, to clear the cookies and fix registry errors. She called back shortly after saying it still wasn't working. Walked her through how to delete her browsing history (Google Chrome btw), in case there was still some kind of error in the cookies, but she still gets the "page cannot be found" message when she tries to check her mail. Any ideas of why it's doing that? She's terrible at explaining things, so I'm sure there's something important she's leaving out.

xeyna, Malwarebytes detects malware and spyware and removes them both. I have found AVG and McAfee are not the best solutions for anti-virus. I'd reccomend using Microsoft Security Essentials couples with MalwareBytes.

Sarah, try opening up command prompt and issue the following command:

ipconfig/flushdns

Give it a try after that and see if it helps. If that doesn't work, try uninstalling chrome and reinstalling to see if that clears the issue

my turn, my turn.

joe, i used to have a mac and a 1TB external HD with all my stuff. now i've switched back to pcs after a decade, only to find out that my win8.1 won't read my mac hd. they're formatted differently, etc etc. my partner still has a mac! so i wiped clean a 3rd external hd and used her mac to partition it between mac and windows (in hopes to pass the stuff from hd 1 to hd 2 on mac, and then on to pc). all good on mac, but when it got to pc, again it wouldn't read the hd. can't remember exactly what i did in regards of formatting (fat32, ntfs, magic,..), i was basically digging through the forums and following some tips from people who could actually get this done.

ok, current scenario: partner's in germany and took the mac with her, won't have it back until september. so i'm stuck with the mac-only hd and two win8.1 pcs for the time being.

given that, is there anything else i can try?

I'm actually going to try these now... After my revelation yesterday that I had no protection software running I installed AVG and it miraculously found nothing. I don't trust that result, because it had been weeks since I had one running.

Update: Tried downloading and installing MSE, it said Windows Defender covers what it can do. Tried turning on Real Time protection, it threw an error which was the result of an incomplete AVG uninstall, so I had to restart Windows and that solved it. So now I have Windows Defender [btw I'm using Windows 8.1, if I haven't already mentioned it] running a full scan and Real Time protection is turned on.

MalwareBytes, however... I downloaded that, it did something with command prompt, and nothing else happened... Should something have happened?

Thanks Joe. I'm gonna go over to her house and give it a try later.

Cheesey, MalwareBytes runs with a GUI so you should have an interface to work with. Try uninstalling and reinstalling.

Bruna, that is a pretty common issue with external drives. The easiest solution is to download a program called HFSExplorer. The format that MAC uses is HFS and windows just can't read it natively. Go to this link and download the program. You may get a DLL error during the install and that is expected. Once installed, click File and then Load file system from device. That should load your drive up and then you can copy whatever files you need over. Let e know if you run into any issues.

You might have to start charging, Joe.

^ I agree :p you're in demand

And thanks again, I'll checkout security essentials. Altho AVG did end up detecting 23 threats that were also found in malwarebytes. Most of the threats were under the AppData/Roaming/Temp folder (whatever that means lol).

downloaded, installed.. can't run it

getting the following error: "No Java virtual machine found! Please get one from http://java.sun.com ..."

ok, installed Java SE Runtime Environment.. program boots up now. let's get that HD out.. see what happens

alright. from the device dropdown i can only see my pc's hd, and the cd rom drive. it's not recognizing the external hd i've plugged in.

when i look at Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Devices and Printers i can see my external hard drive there. so, um.. it's there. i tried the autoscan on HFS but it didn't pick it up.

I'm going to admit it, I am actually learning a lot from most of this.

waiiiit..... it works

thanks joe

Joe the Miracle Worker. Haha.

Thanks for all the help Joe!

this is my favorite thread ever.

Agreed!

Lol my pleasure! Glad to help

Joe...

I was playing with my niece and my dad switched user and went on his account, and I don't know what he did but the text on mine is smaller now. Or bigger. Either way, I can't remember how to change it. Help, please. :p

hah! Well I went over to the mother-in-law's to work on her computer and of course the problem she was having before wasn't happening anymore.
I ran the command you suggested anyway, just in case this time working was a fluke and then installed and ran Malwarebytes because she didn't have it. It found nearly 200 infections.. so good times.
Fixed all that, so hopefully her computer problems are done for a little while at least. Thanks for the help, Joe!

Joey, go to Start-Control Panel-Appearance and Personalization-Under the Display options, there is an option that says "Make text and other items larger or smaller". Click that and try adjusting it back to your original settings. Most people use the default of small.

That's good Sarah! No problems are good news. Malwarebytes will run periodically and clean out infections so she should be good going forward.

i bet joe's regretting this decision already, haha..

i've sucessfuly exported the data to my pc. woo. now how do you suggest i go about wiping that external hd clean and reformatting it for windows? since the computer doesn't recognize it, i can't just format it.. or can i?

lol maybe I'll regret it in a week or two.

Bruna, open your start menu and type in Disk Management. In disk management, you will see your drive there. You can right click on it and hit format. Choose NTFS for a file system. Be very careful with what you choose. If you have any doubts or concerns, download a program called Teamviewer and send me the User ID and Password in a PM. I will be able to connect to your PC and do it from here.

oh, got it. it's done, up and running

just confirm something for me, please. these are the settings i went with. looks fine to ya?