Hi,
I was a Vice President of IT in several major corps and I never knew about the internals of my PC. I always relied on the techies and support groups to deal with the issues we had for over 20 years. I left IT for 5 years and just returned to it as a contractor, working remotely. I've decided it makes sense now, while I can spend time studying it, to learn as much as possible about my PC and how it works, and how to clear and protect it from new viruses. One of my boxes just died - I believe because of a virus and we just bought a new one to replace it.
I'm used to mainframes, developing and delivering enterprise wide systems, but not PCs. I've never looked at the registry on a pc until this week. My goal is to become very well acquainted with the internals of my 4 home pc's - 3 desktops (two 8 year old boxes running XP which I need to get/keep running well for my kids and one brand new one (bought a week ago) running Windows 7 with an ability to run XP (as a virtual machine I guess ?) - for my wife) - and one laptop - also 8 years old - which is mine - running xp.
I downloaded HijackThis onto my laptop, ran it yesterday and found, to my surprise, that I was being routed to a proxy server 127.0.0.1:5555 - and after investigating on google for an hour or so, deleted it from the registry. I also found that an error I had been getting for a missing file - 1.tmp - was actually a virus, so I also removed that.
I ran a new log from hijack this and will download it in the right forum for some assistance. Again, I'm looking for basic training right now, but do want to get into the advanced stuff about how my box works, what I need to do to keep it in good shape, etc. I want to fix the box I have that we just replaced because it died, but I'm not ready to tackle that one yet. I want to get my laptop - the one I'm using for work - up to snuff first. Once I feel good about that, I will address the allegedly infected / broken "box".
Looking forward to meeting and working with some of you. Thanks in advance for the help !
Charlie