Tech Help Lenovo laptop not displaying certain pages

[Mr. Lemming]

No clue what my freaking dad did to his laptop, but suddenly it isn't displaying certain websites at all such as www.cooksillustrated.com. I've taken a look at it in my current tired state and can't figure out what he's done to it. It's not just Chrome either, IE doesn't want to load them for some reason either despite it loading without problems on my system here and my tablet.

I've flushed the DNS cache, switched his wifi connection to the main one instead of the extended one upstairs, power cycled the extender upstairs, checked his settings in Chrome and whatnot, but for the life of me I can't figure it out right now. It has to be something settings-related since it goes beyond just one browser being the problem, but I'm about as well versed in Windows 8 as I am in rebuilding a car.

Hopefully either it comes to me tomorrow after doing some things or someone here has an idea?

 

[Mr. Lemming]

Yay. And as I'm learning some new things about the situation it appears he deleted some files or something from it the other day, which is where my suspicion obviously goes to right off the bat. I get the feeling I'm going to have to figure out where to get my hands on a Win8 install disc and do a repair of it to fix whatever he's screwed up.

 

[Snipeye]

Can you attempt to do a Restore to several weeks ago before your dad got a hold of the computer?

 

[Mr. Lemming]

I'll take a look at it again tomorrow and see if I can't.

Chatting with him a little today revealed it was some kind of security program or something he uninstalled the other day, but he says he has been seeing this problem on a slightly different scale since last week. He was able to go to cooksillustrated.com, but it wanted him to change his password. And after doing so he could view the site again up until he tried looking at recipes, where it would just load to a blank white screen.

The program he uninstalled seems to think it's still installed though too, and judging by some of the things he said about it it sounds like it would occasionally pop up what appear to be ads selling things. I know AVG Free Edition does something similar to that occasionally when it updates, but it doesn't force its way down my throat doing it. Believe he uses Comcast/Xfinity's security thing along with Norton.

Hopefully there's a restore point somewhere in the updates I can use.

/edit

Opted to look at it since he wasn't using it tonight and did find some restore points from around the end of last month/beginning of this month that should work. Unfortunately I now get to learn how to boot Win8 to safe mode w/ networking as every time I try to use a restore point the system reboots and gives me an 0x80070570 error.

Whelp, if this doesn't fix it I did discover the shotgun method while dinking around... It's a Windows system restore that doesn't touch any files/pictures/whatnot, but reverts all settings back to 0. Have him backing up his important things on a USB HDD for safety though, since it says he'll need to pretty much reinstall almost everything. Hopefully it won't come to that, but it's by far the least messy route of a few I can see.

/dos editar

After looking at some of the stuff in his uninstall program list and when it was installed, I got curious about the Comcast Constant Guard stuff and tried removing the lot of it since I'd read some people have problems with it. Except I couldn't as it constantly said the uninstall file was a lie or something, so I blasted it with a more powerful uninstall program. Then I turned my sights to Norton itself after downloading AVG Free Edition and killed that too.

Initial checks didn't give much hope since the site still didn't load, but I didn't want to fiddle about with getting Com-Norton again I just installed AVG and let it do its updating thing. Until almost immediately it pops up a trojan notifier for some program named websteroids. After killing it, the freaking web pages load once again.

Roughly 1:30am, and I'm standing in the living room doing the most jaw-droppingly hysterical victory dance there is.

 

[Snipeye]

Congrats Lemming! Take a well-deserve break (or celebrate with some gaming). You got this figured out without anyone's help.