Inactive Inquiry on malware- To far gone to fix?

[Inactive] Inquiry on malware- To far gone to fix?

A colleage of mine called and told me that he got some kind of virus. All I could get out of him was that his desktop has some kind of notice that he had gotten a virus called "AOL....exe" and that the program that found it was offering to remove it for $52.00! Apparently, he has not had any security software running for years. This first thing I asked him was if he could get into Safe Mode with Networking. I walked him through it and whenever he made his choice on the F8 screen (Windows XP) and pressed enter, he ended up at the same screen. It would not complete the command to go into Safe Mode wth Networking. I told him that he was out of luck and to take it to a professional place to have it fixed.

Was there more that I could do without losing an entire weekend??

How about a command prompt to do a system restore? Is that premature without at least installing, updating and running Malwarebytes?

Thanks.

 

He is computer stupid and he now has no internet, too. I forgot the mention that though the "bad file" is aol....exe, he does not use AOL. I assume it is fictictious.

I know how thorough you are (thankfully) but I was hoping for quick feeback on this scenario. Without Safe Mode/Networking, is it cose to hopeless?

 

It does go to a normal XP opening screen but not to Safe Mode. And, yes, (sorry), he has no internet because of malware (apparently).

 

yes, that's right.

 

Yes, normal desktop but no internet and he cannot even open up the Start Menu... but I'll tell him. Thanks.

 

I don't know if anything can be installed from disc. What anti-malware could run from the disc without an install? Some programs are just an exe file.

what about trying a system restore from the CMD prompt? Waste of time?

I could certainly burn him some discs.

Thanks