On Sun, 2009-04-26 at 10:59 -0700, Renato Patron wrote:
> Hi all,
> I have a customer's computer that has been infected with a lot of
> malware/spyware. I can get into the PC but as soon as I connect to the
> Internet, the computer freezes.
> I'd like to install Ubuntu from scratch, but my customer is not
> completely sure about that. Also she has a lot of
> music/pictures/documents and some software in Windows that wants to use,
> and I think that having a dual-boot will be less complicated.
>
> Does anybody have experience using Wubi on an infected Windows
> partition?
> Does anybody knows of an Antivirus for Windows that will work in Ubuntu
> so maybe I can cleanup the Windows partition?
>
> Thanks for your answers,
>
> Renato
>
Hi Renato,
Here's my experience in a similar situation.
Not too long ago I fixed up a laptop for a friend who had the same
problem. I copied his "Documents and Settings" onto a usb HD, scanned it
from my Linux computer with ClamAV, (AVG also has a free anti virus that
runs on Linux) and found the "Vundo" trojan. This trojan neuters any new
anti virus you load onto the machine before you get a chance to use it.
It also kills Windows automatic updates, pooches all the restore points,
and even corrupts the restore partition as far as I can tell. There is a
software solution to rid the computer of the nasty thing, but it's
expensive, and offers no guarantees that it will work. The brute-force
solution of cleaning it out by hand takes a computer professional about
a week (if it can be done at all), and all the experts said it simply
wasn't worth the trouble. Best solution is to reformat and reinstall.
I asked my friend if he'd burned off his XP restore disks, and he had
not. I suggested that I could wipe the disk and load Ubuntu 8.10 on it
for him. He agreed, despite the fact that he was so FOSS ignorant he'd
never even seen Firefox before.
I did so, and reloaded his personal files into the "home" partition,
then gave it back to him after taking about 15 minutes to get him
started with his new OS, and he never asked for help again. Four months
later, he's still thanking me for it. It does everything he wanted it to
do, and a lot of stuff he never expected it would be able to do, all for
free and he loves it.
It's one thing if your friend *needs* specific Windows apps, but I find
the best way to cure a Windows addiction is to jump into Linux with both
feet. I realize that's not the solution you're looking for, but for my
friend and myself, in the end it was the most feasible one.
Stu
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