Big problem please help...Digital Protection popups.

[ekguy]

OK so I have this crap laptop from SAIT. I no longer go there and as of yet haven't had a problem not having the admin password. But I can't install anything without it. Now I get all these god damned popups from a thing called Digital Protection. No way of deleting it. It's trying to force me to buy their software...Any way I can delete this somehow without installing something on my laptop or am I shit out of luck until monday when I can call SAIT and hopefully get admin access to my own computer which I bought from them?

Any help would be appreciated popups are about every twenty seconds and won't stop.

[ekguy]

Ok I can't wait till monday for this shit to be deleted. I can't call SAIT until monday...Does anyone know of any way I can install something without admin access or how I could somehow get into the admin account.

It's my computer but this shit is driving me wild.

[mushi_mushi]

I would use something like hirens boot cd, its pre packaged live cd that comes with a bunch of different tools. You can use that to run antivirus scans and kill the sucker that way. (assuming bios isnt password protected/ you can boot from cd). You can also give combofix a try although some people say you should know what your doing or potentially you can screw something up with combofix, ive never used it so cant say how easy it is to use. You can youtube combofix and see a tutorial and decide how easy it is to use. You can find hirens boot cd on any torrent site.

[ekguy]

and this requires no installing of anything? I can't install anything at the moment. I almost feel like just taking the weekend away from my computer and waiting till monday to get my password from SAIT's IT department...Gonna have to go down there most likely but whatever...

I might give what you said a try though.

[mushi_mushi]

Yeah no installing, instead of running from your hard drive, this would run from your computers ram, i use hirens, i think its pretty easy but there are some advanced tools. You basically burn to cd. Change bios to run from cd/dvd drive. It loads a gui and then you can choose which tool to run, select antispyware/virus scan and run superanti-spyware, malware bytes, search and distroy etc. Some of the scans might take some time as they are basically running of ram/cd. But if you not comfortable doing this stuff, i would just wait, whats another couple of days. Im not sure if the digital protection program is spyware or something sait may have installed as a trail version. If the laptop itself is yours you can also use hirens to remove, reset the admin password to a new one.

[ekguy]

no I looked it up. What it is is a software that gets onto your computer and then it throws up a bunch of fake warnings and there's a popup that tries to get your info to buy their software. It infects your computer so that you either figure out a way to delete it all which is almost impossible as it repairs itself as you start deleting files and you can't delete it from anywhere in the add remove program in control panel...It's lame. And annoying as all hell.

[adam c]

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

here put it on a usb stick and boot

[mushi_mushi]

Let us know if you have any problems. Ultimately if you had this computer for a while i would probably do a clean reinstall and upgrade to win 7 should your specs allow it. Resetting the admin password is fairly easy, I would probably start there. If you change the password you might still have trouble installing the required software or completing the scan as some of these spyware programs/viruses arnt easily removed. Thats why I recommend the use of a live cd, because it runs from run, therefore the program never gets started, since windows never loads from the hard drive, then its much easier to scan/remove the problem.