Best free firewall???

[Saltheart]

I could not boot to a safe window with DOS. This was a real bugger virus. I could get to dos with a Win 98 start up disc but the damned virus somehow prevented you from accessing the Registry , Winini and Sysyini. Don't ask me how it was doing it.

I beat it by taking the hard drive out and putting it in a USB external eclosure. I then booted with it unplugged and plugged it in and quickly turned of an autorun that it had installed. Then I just ran the AV program and it cleaned it out. Trickiest virus I ever saw.

I then had to go back in and "unhook" the command prompt window with a program I got online . Once I had the command prompt (dos) window I typed in a line to only re-install the restore part of windows. WHAT A BITSH. That's about when I started thinking of cutting peoples fingers off! Anyway , live and learn. The whole episode forced me back into a good habit of having a completely functional backup with boot capability and all the OS and program files working. Next time I just unplug the bad and install the good and Fdisk the virus infected drive and reclone the good system drive. Maybe a 1 hour deal instead of a ten day nightmare.

[Raven]

ten days of hell... geesch

i had an even worse dilemma when a lightening strike
reset my monitor to shut off after you booted up
in less than five minutes so then you couldn't
see the screen to do anything....

i incorrectly determined it was a virus
so i was totally looking in all the wrong places
forever...........and fudged the whole thing up
right down to the bios.....

it was at that point i spoke to someone in tech support
who was excellent at their job that told me
what to look for and i finally figured it out....

[Adam_777]

Make sure your antivirus and pc is up to date.I've picked up quite a few over the past few weeks.Run Malewarebytes Anti-Malware if you have it also.If you don't have it you should get it.It's a free malware scanner.It's removed a few tricky ones for me.I have multiple programs running with shields but the virus still find a way in.I just reformatted on Friday for the first time in a couple years on this PC.I thought I was virus ridden but turns out windows update crashed my rig with it's new version of IE8.After reformat I had the same problem when updating the browser.Driver_IRQ_less_or_equal something like that in BSOD on boot up.Could run safe mod and restore.I use Firefox she uses IE.I'll just run an older version of IE for her until I can figure out the problem.This internet isn't safe anymore.