Oh, the luck I've been having lately...
Recently, I've been having some performance issues and have been doing work I wouldn't normally do to a healthy CPU.
I removed Norton Anti-Virus/Firewall last week because I was told its a system hog. I replaced it with Zone Alarm, but hadn't got to installing a new anti virus software(Avast) before what I think is a virus happened.
I returned home from work saturday to my spouse saying, "I didn't touch the CPU!" Strange to hear words like that, I said "why?" She urged me to go look and when I did.. There were more windows popped up on my machine then I could count. Most of them saying something like spyware/virus in the title, but they looked more like a suspcious ad then an alert from my pc.
I turned off PC, restarted in safe mode. Ran Spybot but it only gave an error and wouldn't work. Installed an old free copy of Adaware, and it worked but.. it only found a couple of data miners. I did a system restore. (*thinking that had always saved me before*) When the machine rebooted after a successful restore, the screen went black after the initial Windows screen came up.
The point I'm at now is, what can I do...
I have pictures that aren't backed up that are still on the HD. How do I get them written to CD? Safe mode wasn't allowing me to write anything to CD or DVD, saying something to the effect of *invalid drive* or *not accessable*
While I don't want to have to reinstall the OS, I would do that if there is no hope.. but I do need to get some data off the HD first and I'm not experienced with safe mode.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Recently, I've been having some performance issues and have been doing work I wouldn't normally do to a healthy CPU.
I removed Norton Anti-Virus/Firewall last week because I was told its a system hog. I replaced it with Zone Alarm, but hadn't got to installing a new anti virus software(Avast) before what I think is a virus happened.
I returned home from work saturday to my spouse saying, "I didn't touch the CPU!" Strange to hear words like that, I said "why?" She urged me to go look and when I did.. There were more windows popped up on my machine then I could count. Most of them saying something like spyware/virus in the title, but they looked more like a suspcious ad then an alert from my pc.
I turned off PC, restarted in safe mode. Ran Spybot but it only gave an error and wouldn't work. Installed an old free copy of Adaware, and it worked but.. it only found a couple of data miners. I did a system restore. (*thinking that had always saved me before*) When the machine rebooted after a successful restore, the screen went black after the initial Windows screen came up.
The point I'm at now is, what can I do...
I have pictures that aren't backed up that are still on the HD. How do I get them written to CD? Safe mode wasn't allowing me to write anything to CD or DVD, saying something to the effect of *invalid drive* or *not accessable*
While I don't want to have to reinstall the OS, I would do that if there is no hope.. but I do need to get some data off the HD first and I'm not experienced with safe mode.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.