oh the stupidity!

[wonderboy2005]

yep. its official. im stupid. a few minutes ago, i was browsing suprnova.org for torrents, and since i have an armada of popup and ad blockers running, i rarely see an ad, which is why that TorrentSearch ad at the bottom of the page caught my eye. i clicked on the ad to see what the deal was, and i was pretty interested - a single source for thousands of torrents - whats not to like? so i decided i wanted to download it and proceeded to do so, and once it was done, i extracted the zip and launched the program. the first window that pops up is the licence agreement. like your average joe, i merely skimmed the visible part and was on my way. however, below the EULA was a 'hint' that said somthing about an ad bar and that it was the only way they got money. i figured that the barrage of ad blockers would stop them, and if not, oh well. just a few harmless ads right? wrong. i continued, and when all was said and done, norton asked if the app could have permission to access the net. i allowed it to. then norton asked about a second app, and since it was in the same folder as the first app, i allowed it. BIG MISTAKE!!! then a third app asked for permission. by now i was just getting tired of permitting and just said yes. suddenly, there are 8 links on my desktop. casinos, "good deals", etc. all i could say to myself was " aww crap!" i immediately shut off my internet connection, then went into norton and denied permission to all of the apps that i didnt know about. thats about 5 or 6 thanks to torrentsearch. then i tried doing a security scan with norton, but norton doesnt like mozilla, so i had to switch over to iexplore. i open up IE, and the homepage is now a gigantic ad, a popup immediately comes up, and there is a god awful ad orrientated tool bar sitting at the top. so i went and downloaded adaware 6, and updated the reference file, and scanned. all said and done, 58 new objects. now im downloading spybot S&D to get anything that adaware didnt catch.

please tell me im not the only one that does somthing incredibly stupid like this once in a great while. well... i know kyle does, but that doesnt make me feel much better.

[Ea$y_E]

haha i did worse just yesterday...

i was tryin to get the latest album from an artist i like, well i couldnt find it any other way, so yea i hit up some sites..

on my way to gettin the damn thing i was subject to a barage of redirect link - redirect link - redirect link nonsense but i was anxious to get it, so i put up with it and said yes to all the popup garbage..

long story short..

when i was done my comp, was tellin me the weather(not local), was trying to update the time from a remote server somewhere(didnt allow), had a ad homepage, IE had a auto url search thing by just entering the name of something, had some crappy download manager, and some spyware thing was always tryin to phone home.

i got the album at 320k/s but after running ad-aware windows wouldnt bootup, had to go in safe mode and remove more crap from the start-up via msconfig. also ran system mechanic to fix up registry afterwards.

alls good now and back to normal.

[wonderboy2005]

:) for some reason, i feel a little better now.

[DudeAsInCool]

At least you each had a happy ending. ROTFL.

[Ea$y_E]

heh i had a laugh myself, especially after going into the add/remove programs panel...

lol had like 12 things i had to get rid of all related to that mess of spy/adware junk

[origin]

see crap like that will teach you a valuable lesson. Don't trust any of those "ad" companies that want to make a until death do us partnership with ur PC. good thing ended all and well for ya wonderboy2005!

l8

[shawners]

hey easy E.. Message me the album you wanted and i do some search if you dont have it or looking for it. =)

[vipp]

Yeah, that's pretty stupid alright. At least you got rid of them though. ;)

[RACKnRAIL]

My wife attempts picking up this crapware from time to time. I have incorporated a few preventive tools. Try Spywareguard (http://www.wilderssecurity.net/spywareguard.html) and Spyware Blaster (http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html)
I especially hate browser hijackers which SpywareGuard is very good at protecting you from. Combine these with Ad-aware and Spybot and you shouldn't have the above mentioned problems again.
They are free too, I might add!

[Ea$y_E]

thanks for the offer shawners, but i have what i was lookin for already and in a pretty good quality at that.

[phalkon30]

Well, after I ran spybot on my sisters computer, I removed nearly 400 results, and our internet was noticeably faster.

[Kevin06906]

Well..with my old computer before getting this one i wanted to make my C: Drive have more space...and i pick the biggest folder out of my C drive....the Windows Folder.

So i took the whole folder and i put it into Winzip for some reason and instead of it copying all the folders and files to the winzip program....it was actually deleting them all.

I restarted my computer.....(Compaq so it was a piece of crap already) and the black screen came up with "Registry has been corrupted" and i knew that wasn't good.

So i learned from that one...don't mess with the windows folder.

It's up in the attic now...but i remember installing an ad onto my computer called "Celebrity" and everytime the computer starts up it has a popup with a nude chick...and i was about to give the computer to my mom....which is a good thing i didn't lol.

[cpugeniusmv]

i went over to my cousin's house for thanksgiving...

her computer took 5 minutes to fully start up, and then...when you clicked on an icon...you could go to the kitchen and come back with a drink and it still wouldn't be up.

this is an athlon xp 2400+. didn't notice how much ram, but probably 128.

it took forever for me to clean it, because i couldn't see the cable modem...it was unplugged because someone tripped over the cable.

after adaware, spybot, and a few looks through the registry and other key system files...(about an hour or two) it was reasonably better.

:mellow some people shouldn't be allowed to use the internet