re: Computer virus fixing threads

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You can probably do that and install it using something called Wubi, which basically creates a big file in Windows that contains all of Ubuntu. That lets you launch Ubuntu from within Windows like a regular program, but I wouldn't recommend doing this. It's kind of "dirty", plus there's probably a performance hit. I would probably take Hopeful Doc's advice and put it on a USB stick, or just wait until you can get a blank disk. Just remember, though, that when it's running "live" straight from the CD, it will seem slow as hell, but that's only because reading from a CD is an order of magnitude slower than from a hard drive.

If you feel comfortable enough setting up partitions manually (instead of letting it do it automatically during the install), you might want to put /home on its own partition. This way you can format the root partition and reinstall (even switching to a different but similar distribution), then remount /home and all of your files and settings remain intact. I can't really recommend partitioning manually on your first install, though, because I've done it many times and it can still be tricky.

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Well, instead of drive letters you have mount points, and instead of a swap file you have a swap partition. The rule of thumb in the past has been to make your swap partition twice the size of your physical memory. My desktop at home with 4gigs very rarely even touches the swap, but seeing as you want to do some multimedia editing you might very well need a nice sized swap partition.

I think the auto partitioner should do a pretty good job, so you can save the manual partitioning for your next go round if you'd like.

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Different programs check for different things. One program may miss what another program will catch and visa-versa. It is best to run an antivirus software like norton/avg/avast or whatever in conjunction with other anti spyware/malware programs. There is a difference between viruses, trojans, spyware, adware, and wareout. Generally "Malware" is kind of a generic term for anything bad which pretty much includes any malacious software.

You can get these programs free from download.com and they are a good combo to have on your PC. These are not the same as "anti-virus" software such as AVG/Norton/Mcaffee/Avast and the like.

Adaware
Spybot
Malwarebytes
Ccleaner
Super Anti Spyware


The particular virus you had is a nasty one. We have seen varients of it here at work that do as you say and disable software designed to remove it. Renaming the .exe file works in some of them.

We have found that the software Combofix can and will fix the problem of Malwarebytes not running. You could have downloaded that software and ran it, then rebooted your PC and malwarebytes would have rana nd cleaned you all up, thus saving that $99.

You could have searched the OT and found this information. I have posted it several times.

I think Chicken should sticky something about this somewhere as this virus and it's varients have been running rampant lately and I have seen several posters asking about removing them.

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