I just been to visit a American run orphanage in China, they have a common room that has a public computer running Windows XP, the virus scanner on the computer is a commercial one and its subscription hasn’t been updated, therefore it has stopped working.
The computer is in a dreadful state, I have timed it and it seems like you have 15-30mins before it freezes.
I managed to download and install Avast, I couldn’t run a full scan… Does anyone have any ideas what I can do?
If it comes to it, I will just have to ask them to hunt for the CD, a I will reformat the computer for them.
Why couldn’t you run a full scan, what errors were displayed, etc. ?
What was it and how did you get rid of it ?
Some can be a real pain to fully remove.
It is highly likely that without an AV the computer may be compromised beyond recovery and a reformat may be the only option, but hold off on that for the moment.
If you haven’t already got this software (freeware), download, install, update and run it, preferably in safe mode and report the findings (it should product a log file).
MalwareBytes Anti-Malware, On-Demand only in free version http://download.bleepingcomputer.com/malwarebytes/mbam-setup.exe, right click on the link and select Save As or Save File (As depending on your browser), save it to a location where you can find it easily later.
Thanks, I couldn’t complete the scan because after a while the computer completely freezes, I can’t move the mouse and it doesn’t respond to keyboard input either, no error messages or anything.
The other problem is I’m not in China right now, but I will be going back, so I will try the software you mentioned.