Solved Dell laptop won't connect to network

[bmw330i]

I've been cleaning up a friends Dell Inspiron N7010 Win7 64bit laptop. The main problems were an unwanted copy of Chrome pounding the hard drive and loads of malware (not viruses). I was in the process of deleting unneeded programs (like Java) when I realized the network had quit working - via wireless or ethernet.

I get an IP address and everything else expected when I do ipconfig /all but I can't connect to anything including my router via IP address. Firefox says Server not found. It's a problem with my network - works fine from other devices. I've tried everything I can think of including a system restore to an earlier time, sfc /scannow and reset IP stack.

Just ran Hijackthis and found something interesting. There was a line that said: broken internet access because of lsp provider c:\users\caity\appdata\local\desktoptemperature\dtwxsvc.dll missing.

desktoptemperature was one of the programs that I got rid of. I tried to do it in control panel but it asked me to close about 8 programs first including Norton. This was not possible so I manually deleted the program everywhere I could find it.

Any idea how I can fix this issue?

 

[bmw330i]

netsh winsock reset catalog (resets winsock entries)
[FONT=&quot]netsh int ip reset reset.log hit[/FONT][FONT=&quot] (resets TCP/IP stack)

restart

[/FONT]

 

[dsperber]

I've found this multi-tool "how-to" guide to be wonderfully successful in purging garbage and malware on a number of infected machines for friends and family.

Seems a "cocktail" of products is far better than just one for this purpose.

Of course you're going to need to use a machine that DOES have access to the Internet to download the tools mentioned, and then somehow make them available to your machine which has seemingly lost access to the Internet because of something you purged. That'll have to be fixed somehow of course, but the above "guide" provided an excellent recipe for keeping things clean going forward.

 

[bmw330i]

Thank you for the malware tips. I'll definitely hold onto it.