I was wondering if anyone could help me out with this. Im trying to clean up my buddies laptop. I looked at it once before a couple months ago but haven't had a chance to take another look at it since then, but upon awakening this afternoon I got a text message from him asking if I could go over there to check it out again. So I thought I would start this thread and enlist your guy's expertise on this matter. I did google my question and conducted a forum search on AO, but was unsuccessful in finding an answer to my question.

But when I did take a shot at his laptop before, I pretty much stopped short at telling him he had to reformat it because it was in such bad condition. Tried running adaware and spybot numerous times, in safe mode, too, but was unable to successfully remove everything that I found. Also, I don't believe I was able to update definitions for both adaware and spyware, as well. There was something on there that wouldn't let me. I believe I ended up reinstalling both to get the updated versions and I think that worked. I ran Hijakcthis on it, saved it to a thumbnail, took it home, checked it out on my pc, went back to his, tried to remove bad ****, wouldn't let me remove all the crap I found. Said his Hijackthis was out of date. Tried reinstalling the updated version of Hijackthis, but when doing so it reinstalled it in another language, German I believe, and couldn't get it to install in English after trying to reinstall it after that again a few times.

He was using a free AV (don't know which) that hadn't been updated in quite sometime, and when trying to run adaware and spybot, the virus alerts were off the hook, constantly popping up with different virus warnings it has detected and as soon as I would close one warning another would pop up. And it got so bad I just eventually ignored them and continued trying to run adaware/spyware

As suggested to me by my professor for my MS Word and Excel who is also head of the network security program at my school, I was wondering how I would go about slaving his laptop off mine to run my Norton AV on his laptop in one final attempt to take back his laptop. I sent an email to my professor asking him, but he just sent one back saying he won't tell me how to do it until the end of this week cause he wants me to concentrate on studying for an exam we got coming up this week.

And, if I were to buy an AV for his laptop like Norton or something, would that even do any good at this point or is his laptop top too far gone already and all efforts futile?

I would have no problem in waiting for his instuction, but this buddy of mine who's pc he wants to me to look at is also my boss at the bar I bounce at and he wants to use that pc there to conduct business so I want to try to get on this ASAP for him.

Sorry for not haing all the info you may require as of this moment, I'm going from memory right now but I just wanted to get this thread started before I get in the shower and head over there to hopefully have some better idea of what I'm up against and anything you guys had to offer either before or when I get there. We are both running XP. I'll post more within a couple/few hours after I take another look at it.

Edit: What kind of cable am I looking for, first