This got me thinking.

The post below was posted in another thread on the board. But it got me thinking what kind of stupidity have you ran into when fixing someones computer that had a Virus issue. And what did you have to do to fix the problem.

I one had a person that installed 8 Different AV's all at once and purchased 7 of them. He figured the more he added the more protected he was.The computer took 7 and half minutes to boot up, And he still managed to have 12 DIFFERENT virus's on his computer.

In the end we formatted the computer and ended up using 1 of the 7 products he bought as his protection.

 

But he was lucky atleast his comp booted up.
Never encountered such personalities and I am really interested what the viruses were.

I also have done something weird installed Bitdefender when Eset Smart Security was installed at the same time. And my comp freezed every time I used to boot up. What an Idiot I was that time.

 

I have them on a backup CD somewhere if I come across them tonight when I'm sorting out OLD CD's ill let ya know the names.

 

I'm surprised that the user wasn't prompted during at least one of those installs to first uninstall one or more of the existing AVs or the process would be terminated.

The only time I've done that was a few years ago and by design.
I had read somewhere (maybe here ) that Avast and AVG could be run concurrently.
Out of curiosity, I tried it and they did indeed co-exist.
(AVG 7.1 or 7.2 and Avast 4.5 or 4.6)

 

A user's computer recently had such slowdown, especially when trying to open internet explorer (took several minutes to boot, few minutes to load IE), I was sure it was loaded with spyware and others.

Never been an AV running either in three years of use. Ran all the tools, anti-rootkits, to anti-malware, anti-spyware, and you know what I found? Nothing.

What I did come across was a massive amount of autoruns, so many, that the system with all of its 256 mb ram was grinding to a halt. Made me realise, if you want to prevent a virus, have so many programs running at startup, make sure you don't have hardly any ram, and your computer won't operate properly, let alone download a malicious file. Virus free computing!

So similar to yours fajo, only it was a ton of programs auto-running (instead of several AVs), and the end result was no viruses found.

 

Reminds me when I used to run 4 AVs, free of course.

 

With my 1st. computer I installed three ISPs !

 

WHAT? lol how is that even possible

 

Dial-Up

 

The cash I spent I dial-up and excess charges (going over the 20 hour block/month limit) back in the old days, I could have bought a Porsche 911 GT3.

Now that's got me thinking.

 

Lol I remember when I used NOD32 2.7 and Kaspersky v6 back in the day and it blocked everything, never experienced problems, but still risky.