Connection loss

[Greywalker]

My wife has a less than two year old HP laptop. It runs windows
Vista and my paranoid significant other barely lets me touch it
on account she perceives I will break it. Suddenly, now she needs
my help Since I am the only one in the home who seems to
maintain a healthy PC I need to find a solution. The issue is this,
she keeps losing internet connection w/o notice. This didn't always
use to be an issue, first when she got it AVG essentially co*k-
blocked her from web access so now she uses Kaspersky
internet security suite and IE (*sigh*) so I have some worries.

I've done a clean boot and the problem persist, my TP-Link
router by all appearances works well so I don't think it's my end.
Had a friend over on their laptop w/o any web issue on our
secured network. She will have connection then it becomes
interrupted so she d/c's and reconnects to the network and it
fixes the issue temporarily(software issue?). Other than malware
what kind of details should I search for?

 

[jmh547]

i had a similar problem with my Dad's laptop and vista. try turning off IPV6 (Link to instructions).

 

[Greywalker]

Thanks for the advice! By all appearances the issue is fixed by removing 4 malware on the PC and updating her drivers for the hardware. There was a couple Trojans, a virus, and something I wasn't sure of but it's all gone now. So far the connection issue is resolved and I am considering using zone alarm and Avast for her PC along w/spybot to keep it healthy. She's a little bit of a newb and made some bad choices but we saved the data and I plan to just format and reinstall.

The downside is her BIOS has no option I can find to format her HDD, nor the simple setup procedures and I've looked hard. Any ideas on what I need to do to accomplish this in a easier manner?

 

[Diggrr]

Well you can't think that Kaspersky's was the issue, people always seem to find a way to defeat the best anti-virus all by themselves.

The drive manufacturer should have a new drive utility available for download on their site, as does WD and Seagate (the brands I use), some even with bootable CD iso's.
Give it a try.

 

[Greywalker]

I do not think Kaspersky was the issue, it was user error mostly on part of her being ignorant to common web knowledge. Of course since we are married she obviously doesn't listen to me, now she found out the hard way to become more learned. However, the subscription to Kaspersky is nearly up which is why I planned a replacement. Thanks for the tip on the drive utility as I'll have a look and result soon. Currently I am unsure who was the manufacture but I will investigate.