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Go to a location where you have broadband. Over a phoneline, these steps are impossible as you're looking at over 500MB of updates that your operating system NEEDS.
First of all, get Mozilla Firefox. It is available for free in the language of your choice at http://www.mozilla.com/.
Then in Firefox, click on Tools > Add-ons. Click on "Get Extensions" and in the page that comes up, use the search form to look for "ietab". Then select that add-on and select to install it. You'll be asked if you want to install IE Tab. Wait for it, then click Install.
Now close all instances of Firefox and start it again. Head over to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/ and let it update. The first few times it searches for updates it may take up to 5 minutes before it finally presents you with a list of updates. Allow it to install all of them. At some point it may finish, and then you either have to reboot as the program tells you to, or simply hit "look for updates" again and go through the procedure again. At some point, after visiting Windows Update again and again after reboot after reboot you'll finally be rewarded with the message that your PC has all the updates installed. You may at some point get a "Genuine Windows Advantage" message balloon popping up saying that your PC is no longer safe and that you need to install Service Pack 2. Then do so.
After all the updates are installed, you should no longer have the error message. Then it's time to do some cleanup action. Get Lavasoft Adaware from http://www.lavasoftusa.com/ and install it. Update it to the latest version, then set it to do a deepscan - a complete scan of your system. Let it clean your system.
Then go to Firefox again and hit the little Firefox icon in the bottom-right corner and click it once. It will change to an Internet Explorer icon. Now in the address bar type http://www.google.com/ and once there, look for "Symantec online virus scan" and the first results should come up with the Symantec pages that allow you to scan your PC for viruses without having to install a separate program on your PC. You will be asked to install Active-X components from Symantec's website - there will be a small yellow bar at the top of such a page to indicate the website is offering you to install such a component. Click on the yellow bar and allow it to install the component. There may be 2 or 3 components it needs to install, I forgot the exact amount. At some point the program works in your browser and you can select to scan your entire computer. Do that and let it run. It will clean whatever stuff it finds on your computer. When that's all done, close the browser so Firefox will reset to its original settings.
Then head over to http://free.grisoft.com/ and download the free version of Grisoft AVG antivirus. Download it and install it. After installation you may or may not need to reboot. In either case, the program needs to be updated. Then when the main window of AVG Free is open, the so-called Control Center, go to Scheduler and click on the button below that says "Edit schedule" and disable the automatic complete scan of your PC. Leave the automatic update schedule intact. Then go to E-mail scanner and configure it so that it scans both incoming and outgoing e-mail, but that it doesn't leave those silly texts in all your e-mails that says "this e-mail was scanned by AVG blabla".
Then go to http://www.google.com/ and search for "Windows Defender". It is made by Microsoft and you can download it from the Microsoft website. When trying to download it, you will be asked to confirm whether your Windows XP is genuine or not. It may ask you to download a program called WGA Advantage or some such for Mozilla Firefox/Netscape. Download it, close Firefox, then install that program, and then start Firefox again. You can then go back to http://www.google.com/, look for "Windows Defender" and jump through the hoops that Microsoft has put up in order to verify whether your Windows is legal or not, which may take a few moments, after which you will be awarded with the option of downloading Windows Defender. Download it, then install it, and let it update. It does this automatically. It will then also automatically scan your entire PC. If all is well, it should report "your PC is running normally".
As a final measure in an attempt to keep your PC running semi-smoothly (well, it IS Windows XP after all) you can install CCleaner which is basically a little tool that empties a whole load of directories that contain a bunch of nonsensical files that linger around because some programs are too lazy to clean up after themselves. Just a useful clean-up tool.
By now, whatever weird problem you have with the PC, it should be gone.
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AUTHOR OF THIS MESSAGE
NovaFlash
MESSAGE TIMESTAMP
24 march 2007, 22:11:58
AUTHOR'S IP LOGGED
85.146.160.235
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