Archive for June 16th, 2004

Registry Medic

A couple of days ago, I reported this. PCCW did not pull thru, so this morning, I placed an order for So-Net Broadband service. There is no guarantee So-Net would pull thru either, as they only support residential installation, but they said they would come and try to install and no charges if they failed.

The reason I decided to switch to broadband in the office after all these years is that in the past two weeks, my modem has been extremely slow. I thought it was the ISP’s modem pool problem as both IE and Firefox were slow.

This afternoon, while updating my Avant Browser, I found Registry Medic listed on their site. I decided to give it a try. The unregistered version only fixes 5 problems each scan, so I went on kept rescanning until all problems were fixed.

What do you know, that for some reason cured the modem problem! And the problem was simply virtually no data passing thru the modem. Everything else ran fine before the fix without slower than the usual speed.

Disclaimer: I am not exactly sure what I was doing with Registry Medic. I ran it as a last attempt to fix any unseen problem and was going to reinstall windows entirely if anything went wrong. So, make sure you know what could be deleted in the registry before you do any fixing with it.

nkvd.us and searchpage.cc Virus

Caught this “nkvd.us” virus (worm?) a couple of months ago. It kept changing my default homepage in IE, hence Avant Browser also, to “searchpage.cc”.

Since Avant Browser a has very good and multiple homepage setup, it pretty well blocked back the worm for me so I didn’t really care about its existence.

This morning I tried searching the Net and found info on “searchpage.cc” here, and “nkvd.us” here. I followed the instructions in both pages but the problem still existed. So I turned off my internet access, rebooted the computer, went thru the “searchpage.cc” info page above, ran CWShredder.exe and HijackThis.exe without the internet access and with all browsers closed. I then opened both Avant Browser and IE to make sure the default page was not pointing to “nkvd.us”. Ran SpyBot to double check and found no problems. I rebooted again and then turned on internet access and ran Avant Browser. No problem so far! Cross my fingers and hope for the best.

One more attention… Avant Browser keeps track of all opened pages and brings them back after exit and re-entry. So make sure you close all the infecting pages before you go thru the procedures, otherwise you would have to redo the procedures all over again.