Diane wrote:
>I'm getting porn downloads on my computer.>>


We need more specific detail. Do you mean your computer is downloading 
movies or some sort of porn software? How do you know?

Or are you just seeing popup windows and porn sites on your browser? Is 
your browser taking you to strange places, as if has it been hijacked? This 
often happens when you add "Browser Helpers" such as browser toolbars. They 
are designed to look good, but are often nothing more than commercial bait 
for malware. All browser toolbars are better avoided in my opinion. You 
simply don't know what they're doing to your browser behind the scenes.

It's probably a bit too late for you now, but you need a more secure 
antimalware security like Avira (free version). AVG has fallen out of 
favour lately for various reasons, mainly because it does not prevent a lot 
of classes of malware trojans. Avira is much more wide-ranging in practice. 
I also like Google Chrome's built-in site security, though I wouldn't 
suggest relying on that alone.

The reason I say it's probably too late is that once this malware is on 
your computer, it will usually protect itself by not allowing you to 
install any new security programs.

You might be able to defeat this by renaming the new software so that the 
malware doesn't recognise it, and try installing it by running Windows (you 
should always state which version you are running) in Safe Mode.

Try installing Avira and Malwarebytes, both free, and running full scans in 
Safe Mode. Both these programs are very good at detecting and removing most 
of the more difficult nasties. (Safe Mode means that with luck the malware 
won't be running). If anything is detected, remove the malware and run the 
full scan again until the system comes up clean, as there are sometimes 
multilayers of the bad stuff.

If your computer turns out to be really badly infected, your only really 
effective alternative is to reformat the hard drive. With some classes of 
recent viruses, removing the virus also removes some vital XP files, so 
that XP will no longer run. Whether the same applies to W7 I can't yet say, 
but I suspect it will.

Don Penlington

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