Aagh. Just when you think you're safe, you get hit again.
It seems that whenever I go to anything on About.com (sometimes Google leads me there when trying to answer a programming question) I get spyware/malware or something like that. For that reason I usually avoid About.com. Sadly, I don't always check the URL of the Google results, and I get stuck with this.
OK. I booted up the computer, so I could do some programming work. I soon got the error message:
OK. I have a GB of memory and a 2.2 GHz AMD Athlon 64 3700+ processor. The chance of me being out of system resources at all is small,
let alone at startup. One possible cause: Malware.
Further confirmation came with a Ctrl-Alt-Delete and checking CPU usage. There was a
huge spike in use right at the start (during which I got the message; during this time my PC was on the slow side, not to my satisfaction). Also, I checked Memory usage on the Processes tab of the Task Manager. A quick scan down the list showed that explorer.exe was using 23,892 KB of memory!
Not good. doing elementary school math, I discovered that in all, I was out 67% of my memory (not just explorer, but all the background programs as well). Ooookaay, something's wrong.
Of course, I'm not a complete idiot. I started updating and scanning. A-squared found 7 malicious objects, all adware and tracking cookies. SpyBot - Search and Destroy found nothing. AVG Free found my HOSTS file, but it always does that (actually, is there a way to get it to stop recognizzing my HOSTS file?). Ad-aware found 5 critical and 40 negligible. >
Pic< Last, and least, Norton found nothing.
After all this, I ran HijackThis to see if anything glared out at me. Nothing did, but maybe you guys will see otherwise. Attached is the log as usual. After all this work, though, I'm running Defrag.
