IT Queries: Computer problems answered

I have a Medion laptop about 3 years old running Windows XP. Recently, the screen background colour has become pink and images have distorting pink patches and stripes.

The pink screen had been an occasional problem fixed by logging off and restarting but it is now there all the time. I believe it is sometimes called the “pink screen of death”.

Is it a hardware problem or is there a software fix? Any help would be appreciated.

We haven’t come across the Pink Screen of Death before. The normal screen of death is colored blue although Microsoft did experiment with a red screen for a while.

In this case, the pink screen is probably due to a defective connection between the screen and body of the laptop computer.

While it might be worthwhile getting your local computer shop to have a look and see if it’s a loose plug, it’s more likely to be a damaged cable or hinge.

Given the age of the computer, you’ll probably find a fix is either impossible or prohibitively expensive.

We’d recommend getting a new system.

USB problem – write protection

I have three USB drives – LG, DSE and Verbatum – which have all somehow write- protected themselves – (on three different computers)

What is happening?  What can I do?

It sounds like a file autorun.inf has found its way onto the flash drives.

Click Start, Search, find all files and folders and type autorun.inf into the file name box. Below that choose your USB drive in the look in box and under more Advanced Option choose Search hidden files and folders.

Then click the Search button.

Any autorun.inf files the computer finds should be renamed to autorun.old. When you remove and reinsert the drive, the problem should have gone away.

The cause of this is almost certainly some software writing to the drives. You’ll need to watch closely to find what’s causing this.

NAT Connection error

Eric had a problem playing a multiuser game with a “nat connection error” appearing on the game. NAT, or Network Address Translation, allows Internet traffic to be get through a router to the computer it is intended for.

The simplest solution for this is to turn the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) on in the router settings. Another option is to enable port forwarding however to do the the latter, it requires knowing the technical features of the specific game.

 This answer originally appeared as an answer on PC Rescue’s ABC program on 15 August 2008.

Stan is getting a message that he is infected with a virus and should run Winspyware protect to fix it. This is a scam and is really just a virus itself but it can be difficult to remove. The best tool for removing it is a free download called Malware Bytes. The linked website has a paid version and a free download.

We’d recommend running this tool followed by cleaning up your computer.

This is Sunday 17th August and attempting up update my AVG 8 free,the update failed, and the reason was no .bin file.
I actually removed and reinstalled AVG 8 free and the update failed again for the same reason.
This leaves me open to attack.Can you give some advice ?

It appears there is a problem with the AVG 8 updates this weekend. A post on the AVG Forums indicates the problem will be fixed for the next update.

While AVG hasn’t updated, it doesn’t mean you are unprotected. Although you should always take care regardless of the status of your virus scanner.

We’d suggest retrying until the good update comes through.

Help! I’m being overwhelmed by emails offering free Auto Identification Cards and confirming air tickets with airlines I’ve never heard of.

Do not open the attachments on these emails!

This is a nasty little piece of malware known as the Ztob Trojan, it pulls all the tricks in the book including disabling firewalls, anti viruses, spamming your inbox and, finally, stealing your credit card details.

Using emails claiming to be spurious airline ticket bookings to spread the thing shows how devious the malware writers are. While it reminds us of the Anna Kournakova virus of 2001, the motives are totally different. It shows how things have changed in the last seven years and today viruses are written by organised crime to rob you.

We need to be careful with these things this Trojan is rapidly being rewritten by the malware designers and many antivirus programs are having trouble keeping up with the changes. We do have some discussion about this in our PC Rescue newsletter.

Do not open anything with a .Zip attachment unless you have confirmed with the sender this is a legitimate file.

Sadly there’s not a great deal we can do about these emails as the spammers are ahead of the curve on this one. All we can suggest is keeping your security software up to date and practice safe computing.

Is it yet advisable to install SP3 on Windows XP ?Absolutely. We’ve had few problems with SP3 and the roll up of all the security patches makes it a must have on Windows XP systems.One word of caution, before you do it back up all your important data just in case something goes wrong.

Hi, I scanned a page and want to change the text on it – It wont let me open in word as it says there is a dialogue box open and I dont know what to do. Can you please help me?

The problem is probably due to the software is opening twice. If you alt-tab, that is hold the alt key down  and press tab you’ll be able to move through the open screens and shut the second copy down.

To fix this, try disabling macros in Microsoft Word. Although it’s more likely you’ll have to uninstall then reinstall the scanner or OCR (optical character recognition) software.

After downloading the Adobe Media Player via the new ABC IView website, my anti-virus software – ZoneLabs Security Suite (ZoneAlarm Anti Virus) – found the following Spyware on my computer and has identified it as a serious threat to my PC’s security:

Win32.Trojan.SpyAgent.dbk
File: C:\\WINDOWS\\SYSTEM32\\msflxgrd.ocx
RegistryKey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe

I’m pretty confident that’s a false positive from Zone Alarm, msflxgrd.ocx is a legitimate Windows file.

A quick search picks up some other people reporting this in the Zone Alarm forums in the last couple of days so I’d say it’s an Zone Alarm update gone wrong. My best advice would be to choose the option to permanently ignore this problem, ZA will probably issue an update fixing this problem in the next few days.

My staff and kids are spending too much time on facebook and myspace. How can I block these sites without buying some expensive security software?

The quickest and easiest way is to edit the hosts file. This file is loaded when you start the computer and is used to direct Internet requests. You can direct requests for certain domains not to go beyond your computer.

In Windows, the hosts file lurks in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. Open this file using Notepad and add the lines 127.0.0.1 facebook.com and 127.0.0.1 myspace.com.

On the Apple Mac the hosts file is in /private/etc/hosts.

Keep in mind this will block all access to those domains, so if you block a certain domain  you won’t be able to receive anything from that address.

Also remember this method, like all methods of blocking Internet access, is not foolproof. Determined little fingers will find ways to get around this block so it’s no substitute for proper supervision.