Windows Update Keeps Re-directing To Google ?
Yep this also happened to me. While at work. AT WORK !!! sorry had to say it like it is supposed to be said, yelling.
Now at my job, I am not “The Tech Guy”. I am the drawings and images guy. I mean I know plenty, but they already have a “resident nerd” and well, he is pretty good at it. So by my wandering around on the internet doing things “my way” abd stumbling into an ” Oh dang!” moment isn’t the best thing for my career. First warning was ” Microsoft is ready to install Explorer 8″ Yep you guessed it, I installed it . Not thinking one time that I was on Firefox the whole time.
Ok I started with the on board Symantec end point. It caught either 8 viruses , or the same virus kept trying to rescue it’s self. lol I have no idea, I was panicking and hurrying , I saw the word ” Trojan” in the pop up warning from Symantec, and freaked out. I decide I better go check Windows update site and see if I ever downloaded Internet Explorer 8, The page would not load, I run to another computer on the network and all is fine, I head back to mine, still nothing. So I headed to the first place I could think of. Bitdefender’s online malware scan. It never lets me down. Well this time it surely did. I take it up a notch and head to “Malware Bytes” and start doing a search in Google and search the term “windows update takes me to Google” and started reading all the people praying and begging for help. The ever so faithful “tech guy forums” turned up an unanswered request for help, wow that was surprising. After about 45 minutes of reading, I find nothing (well I actually found the right thing but over looked it like 10 times) and malware bytes is done scanning, It found nothing, nothing at all, I try and update it, will not let me, along with anything else I tried to scan with.
So now I break out A-squared, not the worst thing in the line up for sure, but it did not find anything either. Ok now I am feeling like I am losing my mind. Well as this is going on I am still reading threads in forums about the issue. I go back to this thread . The first link in the first and only response, well tried that. Second link I click it it takes me to Super AntiSpyware. First thought is ” Well crap, this place looks like it’s just going to make the issue worse. I figured that it really couldn’t get much worse if I scan the file first. So I wander off to the download area for the free version. All was fine until I get to the point that I actually try and download it. Another dead link.. “hmmm, the link is dead, it is blocked, it must be what I need” is exactly what I thought. Ok also another thing about that name, just kept making me think about power rangers. It really6 sounded like the slogan from some kid’s show “super anti-spyware free trial go team action go!!!” is what I kept saying and giggling.
I walked over to another one of the computers in the office and download the file and slip it onto an open space on the server.
Walk back to my computer and here comes the I.T. guy, just in time. I let him fumble through it like I did. He made alot of the assumptions I did at first, I walked away to the store next to the office and get a soda while he does exactly what I did. I get back into the office and there he is, lol just like me.. Reading the forum posts for a second time. We agreed that super action malware scanner was the way to go. Well we install it while Spybot S&D or something was finishing it’s scan.
We reboot to safe mode administration by pressing F* after the bios scan, just before the windows logo. Yess I was just sitting there hitting the F8 button repeatedly till I got the boot menu.
In administration mode we ran the quick scan. Within seconds it finds 3 Trojans and a dns changer, by the end of the scan Super AntiSpyware found two root-kits and two registry key modifications.
We rebooted after the scan and checked to see if Microsoft Windows Update worked, all was fine but still could not update any of the virus scanners. So we reboot to safe mode administrator, and do the full scan. Nothing came up.
So far not all of the issues are resolved, I will go through my “hosts” file and see if there are any changes there. Probably not but hopefully there are. I know how to change that. and I will add the link that I got the file from in the first place to the list of blocked sites. I may even email a heads up to the guys from mvp’s hosts file website (google it).
This is the help I have for you. I hope it works for you. Heck I’m going to run that goofy named program on my home pc now and see what it finds. http://www.superantispyware.com/
Hope it helps you get un-hijacked. I promise that program actually works, just the name is stupid and their web designer is cheesy.
Windows 7 At home, good, bad, it’s ugly
Ok for starts, I have to say that anyone who preaches on about 7 being better than windows Vista, You really did not even try both with an open mind. I like vista, Seven is not impressing me at all. All the stuff about vista I heard everyone complain about but never noticed myself, I am seeing it in Windows 7. I think by now it’s just common enough to blame everything on George Bush and Windows vista, it’s the first two things out someone’s mouth. Makes you wonder where the phrase “window licker” came from.
Well I am on day two of windows 7. The default drivers it installed, amazed me, almost as much as windows vista did. Video card drivers, not so much. I am forced to use almost one year old nvidia drivers. Fine.
For the record, my machine is a mid way between work horse and light gaming machine, nothing to brag about in either direction.
Specs are
AMD 5600+ 2.9g dc
3 gigs pc6400 800mhz
Nvidia / evga 9500 gt 512 mb
some ecs motherboard
air cooled.
Well teh video drivers have been iffy on me and would not let me use the manufacturers drivers. This has always been my special sweet spot, using evga drivers instead of nvidia drivers has always givin me a cooled advantage. but no, win 7 rc is forcing me to use the ones they have from the update service at microsoft, if I install anything else I look at 8 bit graphics at best.
Well I tend to do my benchmarking at pc pitstop.com (full test) . to say the least, my scores drop dramatically over my vista scores. I usually use the old test , it’s hard to find but it’s there it’s a link in the description kinda hidden there. my scores have been i the 3000’s for about a year now. With windows seven they dropped to 1500. strangely it shows my 2d fps increased by nearly 100 fps. Well that’s cool…..
So I turn to my faithful typical benchmarking methods of real testing. :-)
I crack open every version of Grand Theft Auto and install them all.
On gtaiii I get the same hesitation I used to get about 6 years ago. While passing under bridges and through tree covered areas there is a lag that comes in spurts. with vice city, the yellow almost takes over the screen and the cut scenes are jittery just like it was the day the game came out and I was on out dated hardware. San Andreas, well not much better.
GTAIV For me to achieve the 23 FPS at best in game I had to turn everything off or all the way down. When I was on Vista I was seeing 35+ FPS with some things turned to medium. Yes I know my video card is not the best in the world, but it was the same one I was using on windows Vista and it makes a great “before and after” comparison.
Now for the lock out issues everyone complains about with windows Vista.
I head to MVPS Hosts site to update my hosts file to block bad sites and advertisements. Nothing fricken happened. Wouldn’t block anything, So I head to the ETC folder to modify the file by hand. HA! No administrator rights to modify that file. Meanwhile in the background I am playing myspace mobsters. I refresh a page and bam new advertisement, all my browsers drop and fricken notice comes up telling me my computer might be compromised, and it offers this virus scan. then it scans my computer anyway and says I have a virus then tells me to update. I freak out and try and close the page and notice, it’s not windows explorer, it’s mozilla. it’s a fricken spam scam. See if I could have changed my hosts file, that never would have happened. so I head to bit defender to scan my disk onlline. would not allow me!!!!!! WTF!!!!!
So I head to emsi and get a-squared and do a scan, sure enough… I am infected with 4 types of Trojans. I am upset now.
The hardest thing for me to find, I still have not found it yet, is how in the blue hell do you turn it so that you can see your file extensions? Have they disabled so much user ability that they have turned that off? I feel as if I am being dumbed down and pacified with big shiny buttons.
You can like windows seven all you want, but I really have this whole thing figured out.
Either it’s going to turn out to be Mojave, or windows ME 2.0
After some help, someone linked me to how to use notepad as administrator to modify files such as the hosts file
Here
Thunderbird will not Launch
Ok, so you installed the latest Thunderbird update “2.0.0.22″ and now it is acting funny?
I have the fix for you. It’s quite simple. But let’s make sure you have the same issue.
You right click an item and select “send to email recipient”. and you get some error saying that you have to
update/install/uninstall Mozilla Thunderbird or it even says to reinstall outlook.
See at my job we have a mess load of computers, and one by one after the updates, they all started doing that.
I got puzzled after the second one. I lobbed it around a few minutes trying to unscramble this issue.
I headed to internet options and set it to default Thunderbird as the primary email client. Yeah that did not work.
The stupid thing kept trying to use outlook, and it was showing outlook as being buggy. Well the girl I was helping the computer said
“Hey I don’t care just set me to outlook as My email client and I will be fine”
Ok the light bulb flickered twice and then quickly went out.
so I just give in and set her primary email as outlook.
She says ” ok cool thank”
and what do you know?????
As an automatic idiosyncrasy she heads straight to Thunderbird and clicks it. as soon as I saw her mouse over the shortcut, the light flickered again above my head and glowed bright. I screamed “STOP” as soon as she clicked the shortcut to Thunderbird.
An error type message popped up saying that Thunderbird was not the primary email do I want to make it my primary and should Thunderbird always check?. well I said yes to both.
Blamo…… issue resolved. Thunderbird is now her primary without a hitch email client again. So I head back to the first machine at the office that had that issue, did the same thing, and it worked. The IT guy who was scratching his head over it, watched and had teh same look on his face as I did “WELL DUUUUUUH!”
Of course as soon as we declared the issue well resolved. I get another problem from someone else in the building. A lady was working with a program called ” PeachTree”. It will let you automaticly send office files straight from the program through Thunderbird to the recipient. ok cool. but she gets a similar error. So I just hop in and do what I did before and we try again, I try about nine different ways to solve the problem. Nothing worked. I go back to my desk and decide to call the IT guy and let it be his problem. No sooner than me hanging up the phone he came around the corner and told me the “well duuuhh” statement. in options just ask Thunderbird to look to see if it currently is the primary email client. “WEll Duhhh”
Good luck all.
Twitter Ap Added to The Tool Bar
Here is a Preview of the toolbar with Twitter ap added to it.
Ok all I added a Twitter ap to my Toolbar, Yes I know how the 90’s did us all with toolbars . Deep down, we all wanted those dang things to work. To many people added garbage to the toolbars and made them unsafe and well, more harm than good.
Well I found a place that let me assemble everything I use on a daily basis, and something I can’t do without having 900000 things in my bookmarks. The toolbar simplifies everything for me. Down side well, the Twitter Button, seems to work best in Internet Explorer on my home computer using vista. My xp machine, well not so such an issue. Same with the windows seven computer that we are loading full of “our every day software” (the IT guy at my job, and I ) .
You have to try out the media player, you can add a mess load of radio stations and podcasts. Real player and WMP compliant, I am not sure about quick time. I don’t do Apple crap.
Here is a Preview of the toolbar with Twitter ap added to it.
