vista problems

Had a friend drop off their toshiba laptop with Vista home premium on it. Installed avast! (of course) malwarebytes and Super Anti Spyware. Cleaned machine of over 250 virus’s, spyware, trojans and adaware with all 3. Then I installed zone alarm, which I could not turn on, so I deleted that and installed comodo fire wall. All hell broke lose with windows processes shutting down, no antivirus or firewall detected. So I shut down and went into safemode to uninstall Comodo. No luck there. Then when I went back to the normal running, all icons were missing and was telling me desktop was inaccessible. So here I am running scans in safe mode to see if anything got in. Any ideas what the problem is?

Issue has been fixed. Another scan, found an uninstaller and also was able to run my normal desktop again. I do not like vista now, will keep my xp. I was going to install Ubuntu on this laptop, but it’s not mine and the shape it was in, I don’t think the owners would know how to use Ubuntu.

Whilst you say you problem is now fixed. SAS has a Repair function that either restores or repairs windows functions, etc.

See image, click to expand, for a small selection. Note this image is from the limited beta version 5.0.1086.

Thanks! Am know running my registered copy of System Mechanic on it,(iolo technologies)which I have 1 install option left after this (only 3 computers allowed.)Will see how that works, as it repaired another slow computer I worked on. All my scans came up clean, tho I will try your suggestion :slight_smile:

You’re welcome.

Well, that didn’t work. Had to uninstall as it kept freezing up. What I also noticed was that it took forever to do a defrag from either the windows operating system or the system mechanic. After 4 hours of fighting with them, I decided to do a disk check. Took about 3 shutdowns before that would work. After about 4 and a half hours, (and numerous bad files/ clusters)I turned the laptop back on and redid scans for malware and virus’s. None found and the laptop seems to be back to it’s “like new” state. So I’d just like to state again my thanks to the Mods and Techs on this site, plus all the useful forums here, for helping me fix a friends infected lap top. I would share with you the case of beer I am getting for the job…but after that experience, I am going to ask for a little more than a case of beer…

You’re welcome.

With numerous bad files/sectors - I don’t know how old the laptop is, if you have had it a while I would ensure that you keep it backed up in case of drive failure.