Quote:
Originally Posted by Tilley
My laptop managed to get a virus that I can't kick and I need some help. Every program I try to open (Word, Excel, etc) asks me to identify a program to open the file. The option to find a program on the internet to open the file is fruitless.
I tried to download antivirus software (my current antivirus was disabled) but again I cannot run the program because it cannot locate a program to open an .exe file.
Am I screwed? Do I need to reformat the computer and essentially lose everything on my hard drive?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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You have a few options.
1) If you are windows xp, if you have system restore on, you can attempt to go back to a state before you got the virus on your computer.
You can find information on that here:
http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT...rc=sec_doc_nam
2) Another way is you can actually try to find the virus executable in your system registry. See if you can find the .exe of the virus, and do a search on that .exe on the web. Norton has a bunch of virus removal tools. They should have one for the virus that is on your computer.
Virus's are usually found at the following location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Run or
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Windows -> RunOnce.
Don't ever change anything in the registry unless you take a back up first, or you know what you are doing.
If you can find an entry that doesn't look quite right, that would be the virus executable.
That's about all I can think of.