BleepingComputer.com: win32-alueron-h... Reinstall Operating system?

Good morning all. My nephew recently got a used computer (one previous owner) and seems to have run into some real issues. We have already gotten rid of a couple of trojans and did a system recovery with the disks provided by previous owner which seemed to work. Now it seems to be infected by win32-alueron-h. I have looked around at the other posts concerning this here and in other forums. My question would be, if I just get a new XP Pro or even a Vista Home Upgrade and did a clean install from that, would that take care of the issue? No one at his house would be able to go through all the necessary steps to successfully clean the existing system and I can't be there for the time it would take to run through everything. It would be worth it to me to just buy a new operating system for him if that would work.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Hello and to BleepingComputer!

I will move this topic to a more appropriate forum.

A reformat/reinstall, indifferent the Operating System version, would do the trick. Some general information below.

If you're not sure how to reformat or need help with reformatting, please review:

• How to partition and format a hard disk in Windows XP
  
• Prepping for a Clean Install Windows XP.

These links include step-by-step instructions with screenshots:

• XP Clean Install Interactive Setup
  
• How to reformat your computer in case of a severe malware infection
  
• Reformat & Clean Install Windows XP

Vista users can refer to these instructions:

• Windows Vista Clean Install
  
• How to Do a Clean Install and Setup with a Full Version of Vista
  
• How to Do a Clean Install with a Upgrade Version of Vista

Don't forget you will have to go to Microsoft Update and apply all Windows security patches after reformatting.

Note: If you're using an IBM, Sony, HP, Compaq or Dell machine, you may not have an original XP CD Disk. By policy Microsoft no longer allows OEM manufactures to include the original Windows XP CD-ROM on computers sold with Windows preinstalled. Instead, most computers manufactured and sold by OEM vendors come with a vendor-specific Recovery Disk or Recovery Partition for performing a clean "factory restore" that will reformat your hard drive, remove all data and restore the computer to the state it was in when you first purchased it. See Technology Advisory Recovery Media. If the recovery partition has become infected, you will need to contact the manufacturer, explain what happened and ask them to send full recovery disks to use instead..


However, to get rid of this infection you can also follow the steps in this guide.

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Would you elaborate on this, also some details concerning the exact computer, make and model?

XP is getting hard to find and even going up in price, the computer might not run Vista very well