I no longer perform system cleanups, especially on Windows XP systems. I offer one service; recover data, and full system rebuild. I have no time to play whack-a-mole with viruses and malware on infected machines that will inevitably wind up getting re-infected due to the same carelessness that landed the unit into my shop in the first place.
Same. I once had a guy who's PC I recovered and reinstalled Windows on, then he stuck a USB flash drive in it after I left that ended up containing infected files and I had to go back and do it all again. Customer stupidity means I got paid twice for that job.
Insyde BIOS aren't cheap and no-name. Just because the manufacter decided to not add advanced options makes that BIOS "a piece of junk". In fact, most of ACERs notebooks and ultrabooks uses Insyde BIOS (most recents use UEFI as well).
Ah I like seeing these videos, I personally always get asked to remove viruses from pcs. It's an easy task for me, but for others it's like having no more hope.
That is a COMPAL laptop. COMPAL is a Chinese laptop vendor that other companies buy and put their brand name on. The ones sold by COMPAL either say "NoteBook," "COMPAL," or "PRO Series." No, I don't speak Chinese. I know this because my school had laptops that said "PRO Series" on the front and when I flipped it over, there was a sticker that said "COMPAL." That information tag is the same layout that COMPAL uses.
annacomputerwiz The keyboard design with the Home / Delete / etc on the far right of the keyboard looks like a HP / Compaq. I would assume the " COMPAL " name is to let people know it is a knock off of a Compaq. Just look at knock-off of items like Beats and iPods. Those also have sound alike names. For a Chinese person unfamiliar with Roman letters it would fool them as much as the Westerners that have gibberish tattoos written in Chinese characters!
annacomputerwiz Well at least I know to stay away from them, I keep seeing them on those sites with Fake Apple Macbook for $250. I always worried about replacement parts since those never have any brand name.
annacomputerwiz this is also why you don't want to buy a neo double game console! one of those shameless ass-clown handheld systems with none of the features and is a perfect doppelganger of the nintendo ds! if you buy a neo double game you won't believe you have been lied to and saw that hunk of junk!
annacomputerwiz Mmmh might say that a couple of days ago, i was repairing an HP G61 , and after looking for the schematics of the motherboard , i was getting the same result everytime "Compal" instead of "Compaq" then i looked on the board, and actually it says "COMPAL" ..wondering if HP rebrands some of his cheap laptops using vendors from cheap china labels.. now not wondering why there are sooo many Hp g61 - Compaq Cq61 flawed HA!
+Jon A It really is. You're signed in with your Google account. They even state that data will be collected from your searches in the Terms and Conditions.
Jon A Yup. Most sites are spyware, but Chrome actually tracks all of your browsing history and saves it to your account. It's worse than most browsers.
Jon A You have a phone? Could I listen to your convos? Can I look at your search history and emails please? You seem fine with others seeing your private info. If we have nothing to hide, then why spy on us?
Ah the good old times when the fastest way to solve a virus problems was to format it. It was faster than dealing with the time you would spend trying to run an app or boot in safe mode.
I always think when things get this bad, the best, and easiest thing to do is format it, possibly even properly wipe the hdd and start from scratch. (I have known viruses to come back after a normal reformat) I tried to do this once to a friends laptop, I must have spent 2 days getting rid of spyware, viruses and other malware, and after all that it still wasn't right.
Insyde is more popular than obscure today. Lenovo even uses it at least in their IdeaPad series. It actually has WAY more functionality than what is shown on that laptop
It's times like those, when I just make the user select the important files, and just reformat the whole thing. Then again, finding drivers for that thing would be a real challenge.
This is a LAM DL75 notebook. LAM is a manufacturer for OEM laptops. This is probably an unbadged HP/Compaq notebook that was sold as a cheaper generic alternative to HP. I have worked on HP Touchsmarts that were stripped of their name, even though the HP was just taped over.
Jammit Timmaj well, I think it's the other way round. Compal is the manufacturer. Mitac is one of the many companies that OEM from them. Asus and Acer also OEMs some models from them (the K43TA for example. After some digging around I found that my old K43TA laptop was made by Compal for Asus. Specifically the touchpad was had a vendor ID that was identified as Compal).
Wow, times sure have changed. Back then, you'd have to manually clean things up like the one in the video. Nowadays, I normally just grab malwarebytes, ccleaner, and iobit uninstaller. Malwarebytes gets rid of most of the fake antivuirus, adware, toolbars, and whatnot. Ccleaner has this feature where it cleans up the registry so any residuals get deleted aswell. Iobit is for final manual checking to get rid of things that the first two have missed but I never use it most of the time since the two does more than a good enough job.
Nothing really has changed, you get malware: reinstall with restore. Reinstall takes 10-15 minutes, restore takes anywhere from 5 minutes for a mostly networked machine to up to ~2 hours for a machine with a few TB of data, just a simple case of starting the re-deploy job and getting coffee or going for a walk to then come back to a 100% clean machine instead of a 90% clean machine after hours of messing about with various tools. Ccleaner has no use in Windows anymore (nor did it ever really...) as Windows 10 (all the way back from Windows 7) does not load unused registry hives, so no performance increase nor is Ccleaner particularly effective in cleaning registry items from malware, it usually just clears the current_user hive while leaving the other users and local_machine hive alone, just junk.
Man I remember this video. This video was one of the first videos about computers I saw on youtube and I were almost emmidiately hooked.... Although I definetily remember the video being longer
5:04. That sticker seems *REALLY* familiar to me. Oh, right. The Toshiba Satellite series laptops from around 2008 had those stickers on the bottom panels.
This sticker is for the modem or network card, its something like an "Network License" and yes some toshiba laptops not only form 2008 but early models too
I once fell for fake anti-virus software too... I just re-installed from scratch. It's too bad that wasn't an option for you, but at least you were able to fix it. Where could someone even get a generic laptop like this?
Insyde BIOS is actually used by a lot of name brand PC manufacturers for low end consumer PCs. I had a Dell Inspiron 11z-1121 Netbook with Insyde BIOS.
They seem to only be used for low-end laptops, Acer by definition is a low-end low quality laptop manufacturer, same applies to Lenovo which has even been caught installing malware on brand new laptops (superfish anyone?) so notoriously low-quality stuff. HP consumer line is a mix of low-quality to middle-quality, never anything great but at best so-so. HP professional line has some high-quality laptops (and some lower ones too...) With Insyde only being used for cheap hardware it is not a cheap noname brand but just a cheap brand. They are most known for their issues with USB boot, limited options and low cost...
Is that even real XP? In Asia (Thailand) it's difficult to find a computer with legitimate Windows unless you go to a Sony store. Laptops from big stores come with no operating system, and those from small shops come with pirated Windows. What's even worse is that they cost more here than at Walmart in the USA.
Robin Sattahip there are two options to get legal XP in Asia- either you go to a reputable software house like SoftwareOne, or get it straight from Microsoft's online store. But as you already noted it is very expensive since South East Asian money has crap value (sole exception is the Singapore dollar), and to make things worse a lot of features are blocked from every South East Asian country except Singapore. Last time I bought a legal copy I ended up needing to skip lunch for the rest of the month.
Should of gave the guy a thumb drive to write important files he needed too. Then have him write a list of programs he used. Then wiped windows. Once that much spyware has done that much damage it's not worth it. There will still be surprises later, even when you think you got it all off. Given the level of computer experience the original owner has with his "NoteBook" I think that would of been the best option.
The best option I find is to just completely wipe the hard drive & re-install the OS. Then, if the person using the computer isn't very savvy, create a non-admin profile for them, so they can't fuck it up again. I did that with my sister's computer, because she filled it with malware.
Maybe it's OEM version of the notebook, maybe manufactured by Clevo, Quanta, or Compal, and rebranded by some menufacturer, such as MiTAC DL75 (one of large notebook manufacturer in 90's and early 2000's... and yes, it have exactly same model number with in that video): www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/mitac/dl75/218633/
That laptop looks pretty nice. Just wish it had at the very least a model number so I could get one my self. Been looking for a Windows XP laptop recently.
Oh god. Having had to clean up a few lazy users severely infected systems, I sympathize with the drudgery of putting systems like this into order. People just thoughtlessly click on whatever pops up.
I've dealt with malware like this that messes with the registry and won't let you remove it without some real work. I haven't done so in a while, but maybe he Trinity rescue CD (which has anti-virus and malware software removers) would make it easier?
4:36 lol, the brand name is "Laptop Computer" in Traditional Chinese. No kidding. The part above "Made in China" shows a trade company called "Renbao Kunshan", so probably not even the manufacturer.
the DL75 is a notebook that can be licensed by other companys and stuff.. its a weird long story... you can find this notebook usually at wal-mart and such places
Reminds me of a Toshiba laptop with Windows 7 I fixed recently. It had a lot of the same stuff installed and it took me a couple days to get everything working normally.
my win98 notebook had also an insydeSoftware Bios. ( But with more options) it isn't that bad. I would have reinstalled XP in that (yes a windows can last several years, but with so much spyware its not acceptable anymore, maybe there is even more spyware or at least bad / defective system files) also I would install the newest graphics driver from ATI
If I ever had to fix a computer as bloated as this, I would honestly probably just copy the files to a flash drive and reinstall Windows. That would probably be quicker to be honest.
this laptop is made by Clevo / Sager. I have few laptops from Clevo and they are realy great. Keyboard looks like from nec versa. Probably needs a vent cleaning... Clevo laptops are realy upgradable. Insyde bios supports a lot of procesors that socket supports. Usualy there is also a m-pci for wifi card.
Has similar design ques to a Gateway GZ series and it's eMachines clone i owned a few years ago. I parted them out because they had faulty power jacks.
DeeAnna The Shiba Inu xx c'mon u really thought im serious?... But in the case of sockets - this chinese crap at last have VGA, ethernet, modem, USB and so on, instead of simply not having it and being mac xD
+Green Leaf x I own a $900 MacBook air i5 and an Asus Q302 i3 and the Asus is far superior in every way except the battery life, and I paid $320 for it brand new. plus it has 2 gb more ram
$1800 Australian Buckeroos when new in 2006, according to PCWorld.au (under the MiTac name). It actually has Intel Integrated graphics, so that ATi sticker is just marketing wankery. It's a single-core 32-bit so it's not gonna run Crysis or Fortnite (or even Minecraft) but it's good enough to do basic light-duty stuff.
I found a 2007 Dell desktop computer in pristine condition in my apartment building 2 months ago. It had Windows XP service pack 3. Pentium 4 HT processor at 3.40 gigahertz and 2 GB of memory. It was also loaded with various tool bars and malware. I tried Malwarebytes first and it got rid of a few of them but the computer was still taking almost 10 minutes to shut down. I used Panda free anti-virus and that cleaned it completely. Panda Cloud Cleaner is awesome. Now the system shuts down instantly.
You're right. I thought that old computer was from 2007 based on the information I found on the operating system and RAM install but that was an upgrade. It's actually from the period 2002 to 2004. I tossed out that computer about a year ago when I found a better one with an AMD dual-core processor and 3 GB of DDR3.
What you want to do is get an ExtSATA card and hard drive adapter, put the laptop HDD in that and boot from a good desktop to do the fixing, it'll be faster to fix it. Had to do that with a virus that caused a laptop to overheat.
+VWestlife This laptop is made by Compal Electronics Technology (Kunshan) Co., Ltd. CET. ,China, and the branding on the top of the sticker behind the computer is not a brand, it just says notebook as well.
Hey, I have the same view sonic monitor that you show in the background. For whatever reason, mine is not supported by windows 7 (at least not via Dvi / flat panel connector.)
OK that thing isn't a no-name toy; according to my research, it is a MiTAC DL75 made by Compal. That thing is nowhere near cheap, costing about $1.800 in Australia. Here's what I found from PCWorld: www.pcworld.idg.com.au/review/mitac/dl75/218633/
Huh, did the re-install of chrome fix the landing page issue? I remember having that issue a year back on my PC and couldn't solve the issue. Ended up re-installing my OS just to be safe.
"LAM DL75" laptop? "MiTAC DL75" laptop? "DataLogic DL75" laptop? Anyway, how does anyone get so much malware on their computer? ...unless you're listening to a Stevie Nicks CD and reading/following the CD booklet, while at the same time trying to open an ebook of "Triad" (on which her song "Rhiannon" is based on) that one found through bittorrent and that has a link to a font in it that is allegedly necessary to show the ebook text properly, but which in fact dragged in ransomware... which clearly showed the VITAL importance of backups... but I digress. Ahem :)
I recommend Panda Free Antivirus: www.pandasecurity.com/usa/homeusers/solutions/free-antivirus/ It is very lightweight and unobtrusive but offers very good protection.
That laptop was produced by Compal, I'm pretty sure. That company produces a lot of laptops that are sold under names like Medion around here. Sometimes they don't even have a brandname at all, like this one.
ComboFix is what I use to get rid of spyware and what not. The school I work at uses it. Otherwise I just use Acronis True Image to rebuild the entire workstation.
maybe you should install Lin on it. much fater and up to date with modern software. if you really want windows, you might want to install a modified version of windows
what to do if the spyware is in embedded in the hardware..... their modem, laptop electronics are full of spyware.... swedish guys tested and reported their tricks...
insyde is a actual bios manufacture but they are just not as well known like Phoenix, Award, AMI i never used internet explorer i use chrome (use to use firefox till the ram usage issue started)
I got this on my VISTA PC and the only way I could get rid of it myself and the fastest for me was wipe the drive clean and reinstall thankfully I mostly keep my files backed up that I use.