Monthly Archives: September 2008

bsod screensaver installed by malware

Computer Aid Posted on by

Interesting malware.

Recently, I’ve found some infected systems that will also install the BSOD screensaver.

At first, I thought the customer (or someone related) had installed the BSOD screensaver as a joke, and it was unrelated to the infection.

But the first time this happened, the customer called me a few days later to say that something was still wrong with the system… I was told: The system would show a “blue screen with white writing”, and then the PC would restart.

I know I wouldn’t leave a system in such a state (and I had forgotten about the BSOD screensaver…), so I re-visited the customer as soon as possible.

I was not happy to see that the system was working fine and the BSOD (blue screen of death) would go away by just moving the mouse.

BSOD

However, changing the screensaver wasn’t as easy as I thought… the malware had also hidden some tabs from the display properties (desktop tab and screen saver tab).

So after some fishing around I found that a minor change in the registry made the tabs re-appear (go to HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesSystem , and delete the NoDispScrSavPage and NoDispBackgroundPage keys.

ninemsn: how annoying is it?

Computer Aid Posted on by

I used to like reading the news from ninemsn.com.au

But lately, ninemsn has become increasingly annoying to use.

What I find most irritating, is how pages will refresh:

You are happily reading a story… maybe half way through, and suddenly the page will refresh and be re-displayed from the top… so I then have to scroll down to find where I was reading.

Of course the spontaneous video popups, a huge number of ads, and the portal “look and feel” makes the site increasingly difficult to use.

So I thought I’d try the first few sites that google gave me when I search Australia for “online news”.

I got:

  • abc.net.au
  • news.com.au
  • skynews.com.au

At first glance, they have a similar layout.

But then Sky spontaneously started playing a video.

I have had situations where I’ve quickly opened 4 news stories (in separate tabs)… and after a few seconds, I get a barrage of different voices and music… and I need to stop all the videos/sound.

Sorry sky: you’re out!

news.com.au has the same annoying refresh problem as ninemsn… ok, news.com.au is out

That means that ABC news wins. And they have no commercial ads! … ok they do self-promote a bit, but its not unbearable.

I guess I’m showing my age, but the ABC news site is not overrun with gossip and sensationalised videos and articles, so I can read the interesting bits (and not just indulge in voyeuristic entertainment)

internet explorer won’t show some websites

Computer Aid Posted on by

Sometimes, possibly after (or during) a spyware infection, you can find that internet explorer 7 will appear to lock up while displaying some websites.

There seems to be no pattern to what will not show.

I saw an example of this recently… after removing some spyware, everything seemed normal.

But a particular internet banking website refused to work (after pressing the login button, another tab would appear, and than ie7 refused to respond… it needed an “end task” from the task manager!)… yet other banking websites worked perfectly.

I also tried to download firefox, but that also crashed IE7.

And a java update didn’t fix anything either.

How do you fix it without running to firefox / opera / safari ? (to be honest I’m not a big fan of ie7, but I do like maxthon):

control panel -> internet options -> programs -> manage add-ons

Then disable any rubbish add-ons (eg anything from google, yahoo, mywebsearch, and anything you are not sure of)

Try not to disable any plugins from microsoft, Sun, and Adobe.

I’m starting to believe that certain combinations of plugins can cause some difficult to diagnose problems.