Pls Help Acer Aspire 5100 laptop spyware - need wipe

[amb47uk]

Hi guys, am looking for help here please

my GF has an Acer Aspire 5100 laptop, i cant see her for 3 weeks with work commitments, so need to help her over the phone

However since last night she downloaded some very nasty spyware (some spylock shite), i would rather wipe her system (its in need of it anyway).

However she claims to have not got any disks with her laptop (bought about xmas time from comet)

its running XP media centre 2005, am asking these

a) should acer have provided a backup windows media centre disk, incase of a wipe is ever needed???

b) anyone come across this spyware which installs spylock and creates lots of pop ups, changes IE homepage etc.

c) if i ring acer will they provide a xp media centre disk??
if not where can i get one, ii only need the disk as the license is stuck onto her laptop

I am wanting to guide her over the phone to wipe it, this spyware could contain any form of keyloggers etc and want to wipe just to make sure, she hasnt a clue how it got on there, and runs upto date norton.


Many thanks for anyone who helps me,
Regards Adam

EDIT, i think she got the virus from isohunt.com, clicked Run to open a torrent, but clicked run again, which she thought was the same torrent but wasnt, has installed spylock n it has ruined her computer, even system restore wont work now! damn the

[polarstar]

answer to a) is yes they should have supplied the disc's but also check the hard drive as there could be a partition with it on and you burn your own recovery disc's from it.

and b) you could try phoning them as they may supply the disc's.

[C0UGAR UK]

Acer have stopped supplying system restore discs with their products, windows vista has a full system volume backup to a HDD or onto 6 cd's or a dvd, however if you backup to a HDD it will not be bootable

If it is under warranty Acer have excellent support, you will need to have serial number/warranty card/supplier/purchase information at the ready though.

Do not think Acer will supply you with free recovery cd's now due to the Vista features i mentioned, and each Acer recovery cd has a licenced version of windows

Acer support site below

http://support.acer-euro.com/drivers/downloads.html

This site has all Acer recovery cds for purchase/download for £10, yours is here, you will need your own windows OS disc due to copyright laws, these are great for installing your own OS they have all drivers etc, I have used one for someone who lost recovery discs

http://www.user-guides.co.uk/asp/product.asp?product=1266&ph=search&keywords=5100&recor=1&SearchFor=any&PT_ID=all

No more time, have fun

[duffy90210]

I would imagine may be easier to try to fix the problem.
Try the following :

Disable System Restore.

1. Download Avast Home (www.avast.com (http://www.avast.com)) and install, set to scan after reboot, it should find most of the nasty ones before Windows next restart.

2. Once in Windows, update Avast, and do another scan within Windows.

3 . Download SpybotSD , update and run a full scan.
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/mirrors/index.html

Finally go to www.bitdefender.com (http://www.bitdefender.com) and run the online scan.

After you have done all that, I would imagine that most of her problems would be solved.

HTH