Last week I told you about my situation after installation of a program I was testing to possibly recommend to you. After the test it failed to perform as advertised. I then uninstalled the app, went on about my business and realized it had put malware into my computer.
This week…the aftershock.
I dug into Google to search for a fix for this particular problem. The problem was that after the uninstallation each browser I used had a new Yahoo search tab open. The page did not appear to be an actual Yahoo page. If you use Yahoo you will see that the URL will be, "www.yahoo.com." The one in the new tab had an additional ten – fifteen characters which is wrong.
I found several different suggestions on how to resolve this issue. I tried several solutions that had registry edits, folder removals, and other suggestions – none were effective.
After an hour or so I decided to run a System Restore which has been built into the Windows OS since Windows ME came out in 2000. System Restore will basically roll back your entire computer to a previous time in history. It will not affect files you created such as Word documents or spreadsheets but it will remove any software that was installed since that date. This means that usually after the restore process is finished and your computer reboots any problems you had will be gone. Well, not so with this issue.
After the system restore my computer would not restart. I got the new blue screen of death for Windows 10 which has a large “frowny” face. Cute but disgusting none-the-less.
I was not too discouraged with this latest non-starting situation since I had already decided to rebuild this computer. My feeling has always been once you have a virus or malware you have one choice. That is to set aside several hours to wipe your computer clean and rebuild it from scratch.
So I reformatted the hard drive, installed Windows 10, and added all of my programs as if it were a new computer. Unlike you, when I get a new computer I wipe it clean and rebuild it myself. Call me a geek but that way I know exactly what is on my system. So this was not a big deal to me. I sort of enjoyed it. If you ever have to do this you must make sure you have all of your serial numbers for your applications so that you can reinstall them.
As I have said before I use Dropbox. So I simply downloaded all of my personal files, like articles I have written over the past 15 years, and all was well. A pain to do but it was a little like spring cleaning for me.
I have had emails this past week from people wanting to know what the program was that caused all the problems. If you are interested shoot me an email and ask.
