Michael wrote:
>a horribly =
>sluggish system to the point of being intolerable.  We're going to add RAM =
>(from 1 G to 4) and see if that speeds things  up. >>


That's like putting the ambulance at the foot of the cliff. Band-aid 
solutions like adding RAM won't fix existing problems, and most likely 
won't improve anything. Much better in the long run to fix the problem, 
even if the fix is as drastic as a reformat, rather than try to patch it over.

Of course, if you've cloned your hard drive, then that's the quick and easy 
solution to any of these sorts of problems---but presumably you do not have 
that solution available to you.

Save your money and reformat your hard drive. In many cases with that 
particular infestation, reports from many readers in several forums 
indicate that there's no effective alternative. As you delete the bad files 
they simply regenerate themselves with random names, so it's almost 
impossible to track them down. You'll end up spending many fruitless hours 
chasing your tail, all to little avail.

In 3 cases I've seen of this family of malware (I don't think Antivirus 
2009 is properly classified as a trojan) the only solution I found to work 
completely was to run a newly-updated Malwarebytes from a BartPE boot disk. 
That seemed to work quickly and efficiently. The update must be done on 
another computer.

I'm not sure whether Malwarebytes would work if the nasty has already been 
partly removed, but it's worth trying---your Dell tech would doubtless have 
a boot disk from which to run it. (Or maybe he's already been down that road).

Don Penlington

      "Hold No Punches.." Rode brings you great shareware/freeware
        programs with his honest opinions in this weekly column.
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