So a couple of days ago my neighbour comes to me saying his pc is running slow and if I could have a look at it. So last night I went in to try and fix it to discover it would run fine for about 5 minutes then get to the point it was so slow you could not move the cursor without difficulty.
This shouted spyware to me so I ran all the usual scanners ie. adaware, spybot & hijack this, however, the problem still persisted so I booted the computer into safemode to see how it run and it was fine which suggested it must be a certain program that is slowing it down. Back in normal mode I realised a couple of programs in the task manager called PM_Proc1 and PM_Proc2, when trying to end these processes they would just restart which suggested something a bit dodgy was going on with these seen as they are not system files.
I discover they are to do with a program called "platte media" which leads my neighbour on to say it was a program he had installed to watch films for free (hes a complete computer newbie so I guess he fell for the trap), also I didnt see anything about billing when I was fixing the computer. He said he phoned platte to ask how to uninstall it any they sent him out a disk burnt from a blank cd (which got me wondering if this company was at all reputable) so I presume he gave over information but im not sure what. The uninstaller did not resolve any of the problems so I booted back into safemode and removed any traces of this platte media and the pm_proc files from the registry & harddrive.
So after around 4 hours of me trying to find out what was wrong with his pc and removing the problem (his pc is fine now by the way) I come home and, curious to hear if anyone else has had a problem with this platte media, I do a search and find this whole forum dedicated to it! I guess the difference is people on here are saying they didn't download it in the first place where as my neighbour stupidly did. I'm just wondering now if removing it was the wrong thing to do (considering his computer was unusable with it installed) and do you think he will be getting a bill through the door? I guess its just a case of waiting to see what happens but I have no idea how this company can get away with this crap
Steve
