Thank O, I will check them.

Can anyone point me in the right direction please..........
I have two screens running on my desktop,which has been set up and working fine.

I now appear to have lost the RED colours / shades from both displays.This is affecting everything from TV to documents and web.

Have tried all the display settings and manule colour type settings on the monitors but no change. Every thing else is working fine.

Where should I be looking ?....Could it be graphics card ?
Thanks Graeme.

Take the lid off....

The problem is most likely to do with the connection of the graphics card into the slots in the motherboard and/or a fault in the vga cable. To see if it has an internal fault, you could try waggling the latter.

I would guess its the cable check thats its properly in at both ends (PC and Screen)

Don't know if anyone here uses Zonalarm for anti virus protection, as opposed to its normal firewall use?? but if you do be warned .......

Its rubbish

I am just working on a machine that has dozens of infected files and several Trojans along with a nice collections of premium rate diallers etc, and its been "protected" since new with a regularly updated version of ZA. What's more ZA seems to be properly configured.

A friend of mine has just signed up for BT Broadband :( I've suggested that he bin the BT router and CD and buy an ADSL router with a better firewall.

I know that this configuration would be easy with most ISP's but am slightly worried that BT have been able to make it difficult to connect to broadband without their software, as they have done with dail-up.

Any comments welcome.

O no its easy, they imply their software is essential but it isnt You just need the userid and password as usual take about 20 secs on the router.

Thanks S

Spaceman

ZA anti-virus - Thanks for that. I was thinking of getting it to replace my Fix-It Utility one. Don't think I'll bother now!
Strange isn't it. You'd think a combined firewall (I think ZA firewall is pretty good as far as software ones go) with anti-virus should be the dogs-bollocks!

my local IT guys also say that Norton antivirus/net security suspect(with firewall). Virus part OK.

Sorted the display / graphics problem.Checked the graphics card and the fan had gone.Blocked with dust. New card for 50 and everything is back to normall.Thanks for help. Graeme.

Graeme

That would seem to be a good warning to check all of your other fans.

A bit of an update regarding my comments on ZA anti Virus yesterday. I am now a bit confused !

While cleaning the machine I used a number of different tools including Trend Sysclean, AVG Free (which has recently been updated to version 7), Mischel TrojanHunter, Spybot S&D and Adaware Free. However even after all of this I was still suspicious that there were some problems, and I did a scan using ZA Anti Virus, and guess what it found a few more infected files, this seemed very strange so I did bit of googling to find what others thought of ZA Anti Virus.

It seems that ZA use a well regarded 3rd party virus scanning engine which has a good detection record. So I went back to the PC I was checking and rechecked its settings, as before they all seem fine.

I have not been able to speak to the owner of the PC to see what he is doing but I am wondering if he is cancelling regular scheduled checks or possibly not taking any action when ZA finds infections that it cannot clear.

For interest the files found by ZA were in archives and it was not able to clean them, I had to clean them by deleting the files.

I did not keep records of what infections were present on this PC however during the clean up I found that my home network kept collapsing, at first I though that this was a problem with my router and rebooting it solved the problem for a little while but it kept returning, then I noticed that this did not happen if the infected PC was disconnected.... So I started up a network Sniffer and watched the network switch and sure enough the infected PC was flooding the local network with traffic to the extent that it was unable to respond.

I still use my router to provide firewall protection and also use Free software for virus and spyware protection, in my view it is not necessary to spend money for a good level of protection.

For anyone that is interested this is how I look after my machines at the moment :-

Firewall - Router provides basic protection and XP SP2 firewall also on my XP machines (I also have a W2K machine and a Mac they have no add-on firewall.
Spyware/Adaware - Spybot S&D and Adaware Free, both of these are free.
Anti Virus - AVG Free, now using version 7.

I also use a proxy server to provide further protection and to prevent web issues that I find annoying ! (thanks Alex)

I know I keep on about it but its easy to get very concerned about all the virus problems and other malicious actions that the press keeps reporting, try and remember that if you take basic precautions and use a few well chosen free products you can have a high level of protections. There is a lot of scaremongering going on and the companies writing software to protect you from these potential threats is doing a lot of it. I am not saying that the threats do not exist, but I am saying that they are mostly potential threats which if you take care you can avoid.

7th Floor, so it turns out that ZA may be OK, however I don't think it necessarily follows that a product by a company that is well know in one area will also be good in others, ZA firewalls are very well regarded however including Vius scanning is to some extent a marketing ploy to enable them to market a security suite, they have bought in the virus technology and even if its detection is OK it seems that its still possible to end up with a badly infected machine.

S

Thats a useful read for everyone.

It is possible that your friend only had one warning from ZA which was then dissabled by the virus. Always best to do the occasional safe mode scan.

As regards the network traffic that the computer generated, was it enough to show up in the XP task manager?

O, I didn't really look at the rouge PC when I was sniffing the network, I was using ethereal from one of my machines and when I realised what was happening I disconnected the rouge PC and continued cleaning it. I am not sure what bit of malware caused the network storm but its not happening anymore ;-)

I am writing a quick note for the pc owner to add a safe mode virus scan to his weekly tasks !

I know some other have been recommending Firefox browser for some time now but I have stuck with IE because of a couple of other programs I use integrated with it. However now that I have ditched the other products I decided to give Firefox a try.

I installed it about 3 weeks ago and so far I have been very happy with it, I prefer tabbed browsers so that aspect alone is very appealing. However the browser seems very stable fairly quick and generally very nice to use. There are however a number of sites that do not work with it, in my case these are mainly bank sites, this problem is annoying as its caused by short sighted developers, It might be possible to configure Firefox to pretend to me IE but if it is I have not found the config option yet.

So a very good browser but you probably need to keep IE as well.

For anyone that's interested its available for download from here :- http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

Warning - I've just opened a "christmas card" from an address I trusted - I now have the I.worm/Zafi.d viruswhich appears to have mailed all my address book.
AVG anti virus is picking it up as I write - although I don't understand how it didn't detect it on receipt? I run the test every day but note that AVG updated definitions before starting the scan so this might be a very new virus.

kernow, Trend sent out a warning about this virus yesterday, it is a new varient of an existing virus. More info here http://www.grisoft.com/virbase/virbase.php?lng=us&type=web&action=view&qvirus=086fdb265e840000

The files detected as infected can be deleted as they are created by the virus.

The problem with anti-virus programs is that they give a false sense of security. You are better off removing them and instead ensuring that the way you use your computer is safe. Opening attachments from anyone, known or not, is a no-no unless you are absolutely sure you are expecting them.

Yes there is a new virus that masquerades as Christmas greetings, see http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.erkez.d@mm.html. Symantec only updated their virus scanner the day before yesterday.