While viewing a website a dialog box appeared asking me to enter details before continuing. After closing the box without entering any details, I received an error message advising that my system had been compromised, or words to that effect. I can’t find anything in Help files to advise what this means, but assume it could be serious. Can you advise how I can check for any problems? A couple of days after this incident, upon closing the Internet connection I received a message looking like a Windows message, saying ‘Get your free credit report now’ - which I guess is an advertisement of some sort. Could this be related? In the meantime, I ran ScanDisk, which took 3 hours and kept restarting with a message that the hard disk was being written to. I then ran Defragmenter
which took 2 hours, with a message coming up on many occasions saying the ‘Drives contents changed. Restarting’. As nothing else was running at the time, I thought this might have something to do with the screensaver - which did come on from time to time. Could this be caused by something else? My operating system is Windows Me. (more…)

When running a virus scan I noticed that the scan spends a lot of time scanning the temporary internet files/contents (seemingly every internet action we have ever done. Hundreds, if not thousands of files). Can the contents file be emptied/deleted or are there important operating files enclosed? (more…)

I am currently being bombarded with a lot of mail which consists of advertising for products. Is there any way of stopping this? I am also being flooded with emails carrying the w32.Klez.gen@mm virus - currently about 30% of my incoming email. However, I can’t advise the people concerned as they just come with a prefix like ‘unknown03b7.data’. Is there anything one can do? (more…)

I refer to your advice in the Canberra Times on Monday 22nd April under ‘Icky Kak’ where you recommended removal of a virus that had been detected by EZ Antivirus. I always thought that when my antivirus (Vet) detected a virus and displayed ‘Not Restored’ it meant that the virus was removed. Is that not so? (more…)

I’ve been receiving regular junk mail messages which say ‘If you do not want to receive these emails please place NO-MORE-PLEASE in the subject and reply’. However, each time I do this, I receive the message ‘Transcript of session follows .. while talking to … <<< 550 sorry, no such user here ... User unknown'. Is there anything that can be done to stop such messages? (more…)