Sunday, August 21st, 2005

I picked up another Dell laptop last Wednesday. It belongs to a college student but I got the call from the person's parents. The complaint was that the computer would get bumped off the Internet after a while of surfing. I picked the computer up at 8:30 in the morning. By 9:00 I was working on it. Here is what I found and what I did to resolve the issues.

My first experience with the machine was not positive. It would not boot. I forced it to turn off by holding the power button down. I restarted and noted that it took a long time for all the programs to load. I ran the msconfig utility to see what applications were set to load on startup. Two program names looked suspicious to me. The first was TrusyHound-ts.exe. I performed a Google seach to confirm that it was a problem and came up with this link. I deselected the check box so that TrustyHound-ts.exe did not load when I rebooted the computer. The second executable file name that looked strange to me was system.exe. Turns out that according to this link that name belongs to a virus called Trojan.Mitglieder.B. I deselected it to run on startup as well.

The next thing I did was connect the laptop to my network to see if I could update the user's antivirus software. The update failed so I installed AVG, updated and ran the software to remove Trojan.Mitglieder.B. Then I ran the netstat utility (start - run - type cmd - then type netstat and press enter) to see what other computer were connected while the Dell was online. None were. I deleted cookies, removed all Temporary Internet Files and deleted the contents of the Temp folder.

Then I downloaded and installed a copy of Microsoft AntiSpy, updated and ran the application. It found TrustyHound and removed the problem. I booted into Safe Mode and ran both applications again. Neither found any problems. Then I rebooted again and ran the updater for McAfee (this the antivirus originally installed on the Dell). This time it worked. Next I ran Windows Update and installed all critical updates and rebooted. Next I ran disk defragementer, and rebooted again. Lastly I turned on System Retore (it was turned off) and created a clean restore point. I left the machine connected to the Internet to see if any problems arose. All was well.

I called my client and set up a meeting for the following day to return the laptop. It only took three hours to get that machine running as though it was fresh off the shelf and my client was quite happy to hear that the machine was feeling better.