Laptop Problems: "PSW.Sinowal.S"

[Crazedwraith]

Well I got this laptop when I started university so about two and a half years ago. Its an Acer Aspire 1640Z and generally it works pretty well apart from recently its started giving me problems. First, a few months ago it started slowing down and consistent giving me a blue screen owing to some graphics problem but using system restore to roll it back a few months seemed to solve that problem.

Still recently it seems to have been developing more problems; for one thing hitting Crtl-alt-del doesn't seem to give me the whole menu anymore instead just the list of processes.

And most recently and most worryingly, AVG keeps find a trojan: PSW.Sinowal.S attached to explorer.exe and seems unable to do anything about it. Which seems a significant problem. Any help would be appreciated. I realise the standard advice is usuallu 'nuke the hard drive and re-install' but I'm not entirely sure how to go about that and I certainly don't seem to have a windows CD.

[Dominus Atheos]

Still recently it seems to have been developing more problems; for one thing hitting Crtl-alt-del doesn't seem to give me the whole menu anymore instead just the list of processes.

Double click on the border around the list.

[tezunegari]

If you bought the laptop from a store you might have one of those with a hidden partitions as rollback-CD. I really dislike those.

Have you tried to use AVG while in Windows safemode?
(to get there: while booting press F8)

[Dominus Atheos]

And most recently and most worryingly, AVG keeps find a trojan: PSW.Sinowal.S attached to explorer.exe and seems unable to do anything about it. Which seems a significant problem. Any help would be appreciated. I realise the standard advice is usuallu 'nuke the hard drive and re-install' but I'm not entirely sure how to go about that and I certainly don't seem to have a windows CD.

No one uses CDs anymore. For an Acer, alt+f10 when the computer boots up will get you to a back-pocket on the hdd that will format your computer and reinstall windows.

[Crazedwraith]

Thanks guys. I'll try the safe mode before re-formating then.

A question about formatting: The hardrive on the laptop is split into a C and a D drive, is the formatting going to affect both of them or just the C drive, where windows is installed?

[tezunegari]

Formating drive C will only affect drive c.

Unless you have installed software on drive d you're in the clear. If you have done that you might have to reinstall those again because some programs requiring certain registry entries that are set during the installation process.

Under a normal Windows installation you could just tell windows to delete the old C-partition and create a new one to install into. Don't know how that is with a rollback-partition though.

[Netko]

The newer rollback partitions are specifically set up with C (system) and D (data) in mind and they only wipe C.

Of course, check your laptop's documentation and such but if it came prepartitioned with C and D its a pretty safe bet the recovery process will only wipe C.

Of course, this can sometime also be annoying like in the case of my current laptop that has dual 320GB drives and came with 3 partitions - apparently the system image they made didn't account for the second drive so they did the usual split of the first one. Oh well, now its been nuked and I'll just drop Business off of MSDNAA on it if/when I need to reinstall (or probably Win7 by that time).