This was just too good not to share. Our friend made the mistake of taking his computer to Best Buy to have them remove and repair virus problems. $199.99 later, they returned the laptop to him with the viruses supposedly removed, but mentioned that there were problems now with the operating system as a side effect of removing the virus.
It seems that they think "an operating system problem" is acceptable. In this case, the computer immediately went to a screen indicating that there was a problem with the startup device. Telling it to continue simply cycled back to the BIOS splash screen and back to the message. In this case, though, the freakin' message told them what to do - insert your operating system installation disk, restart the computer, choose the appropriate language and then select the repair option. It was all right there. We fortunately had a Win 7 Home Premium install DVD, followed the instructions, and quickly repaired that issue. The repair process told us to restart, and the computer started just fine. All of 10 minutes work, maybe.
After getting in, we updated MalwareBytes and ran that, which found 3 problems including a Trojan FakeAlert, then tried to get on the Internet using Mozilla just to find that there was a problem accessing the proxy server. We went to Internet Options and cleared the "use a proxy server" option (which is frequently something that is set by Trojans and malware). That got us on the Internet just fine. We then installed and ran SpyBot - it only found 1 entry for AdBrite.
At The Computer Cellar, we typically charge anywhere between $90 to $120 for virus removal. I personally feel that this is a lot of money to have to spend just to get rid of something that you were simply an innocent victim of (well, most of us are). It does take time though and requires a thorough look at the computer. Simply scanning the hard drive externally and removing viruses that way is never sufficient; I find that the best success is to do it from the problem computer directly and ensure that everything is addressed. Returning the computer to the customer in an unusable state would qualify as one of the jobs that we couldn't charge for, not unless the customer then wanted us to do data recovery then possibly reinstall the operating system. They do get torn up sometimes so badly that this is the only answer, but that is just part of the job.
Daryn
