Dear Helpful Computer Gurus -
(I kept running over - like double over - on characters when I cut & pasted the notebook texts, so I attached them.)
Symptoms:
(I'll try to be concise).
As w/a other of your users...
New ASUS computer bought for Christmas. Comp was Win 8.1 touchscreen enabled. I downloaded Chrome and enabled it as primary browser; first searches came up in German. I downloaded Avast. Things got immediately much worse – rapid-fire popup ads; search results that had little to nothing to do with search terms but resulted in related popups; the tag “?trackid=sp-006” added to every Chrome URL. IE/FF not attempted.
Restarted computer; computer started in safe mode and took 90 minutes to start. >1200 corrupted/infected files found. I tried to download a picture of the "HAL-9000" to post on FB - it routed me to German Google site... and omitted "Bilder," German term for "Image." Funny. Except not really. The second time around, it did include "Bilder."
Computer returned to Bestbuy.
2nd comp bought – different system, standard laptop, still Win 8.1. Downloaded Chrome. Chrome automatically attached to taskbar; first time I clicked on it, came up as http://www.google.com?trackid=sp-006.
Stopped using Chrome and started IE. I did not have the same problem. Uninstalled Chrome and tried downloading from Google rather than Chrome site – problem recurred. Could delete the added search tag and complete searches, but I could find no FAQ’s that satisfactorily addressed this question – although there seem to be many individuals all with this issue, all w/in ~<2 mo. I never put Avast on this system.
This system did come with “Webroot,” which has failed to pick up the problem.
My husband brought it to his tech people; not sure what they did, but when he brought it back, sys appeared clean for cpl days. Tag recurred after visiting a school website. Husband's team recommended Malwarebytes; it picked up nothing.
FB friend recommended removing the trackid tag from Chrome settings, which I did; the problem recurred in an hour.
The URL tag continues to a) route me through Germany; b) render searches meaningless; and c) whenever I DO remove that tag, the searches seem to continue to go through Germany. In addition, the system gets slower and slower and slower, and the keyboard seems to have difficulty keeping up with my keystrokes.
My ability to return this second computer runs out within the week – I don’t wish to return it, as I suspect I’ll just be stuck with the same problem again.
Tx much,
JH
(Again, I did try to cut & paste FRST & Addition texts, but they put me over by 80,000 char, so I had to attach.)
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