I have a pretty big problem on my computer, and I want to know if Alcohol is indeed responsible for it. I heard somewhere that if your using a cracked version of the software, it can cause your computer to become unstable. Well, I'm afraid I did have a cracked copy My stupid little brother thought it would be fun to download and crack Alcohol 120% just because he thought it was a good program. I had no idea he knew how to find illegal stuff at all, so I just assumed he bought it. Anyway, eventually I found out it was illegal (I of course uninstalled it immediately) and switched to the free version of Alcohol 52%.
Anyway, my question is, can a cracked version of Alcohol make your computer unstable?

Sorry, those who run cracked versions of Alcohol get no sympathy from me. Not only could it cause stability issues, you could also face security issues. Essentially you've run a program that was modified outside of the company that develops it by persons unknown. Need I say any more.

Well then it's a good thing I don't run cracked versions of Alcohol, isn't it?
I removed as many traces as possible after I found out it wasn't legal. Are you going to punish me for what my brother did?
Should I just expect more criticism, or is someone going to help me?

^ Your original question was whether a cracked version of alcohol can cause system instability. The answer given was yes. What help do you need? Has your system become unstable? If so, how?

If it has, you should bear in mind though that there really isn't any way that alcohol support staff can know just what a cracked version may have done to your system. They didn't program it.

If you are having problems, the most likely problem would be the cracked program contained some sort of Trojan. Or the website your brother downloaded it from, unless he used Firefox or opera to view this website, then it most likely had some sort of ActiveX drive by download malware hidden in its pages.

Therefore the best thing I would recommend first of all is to do a full system scan with a high quality Antivirus which is good on finding Trojans. Such as Kaspersky Anti virus is the best. (note: Norton is very poor on detecting Trojans so if this is what you have you will need to use a separate trojan program like Ewido).

Then after this do a scan with Microsoft antispyware. Then finally do a junk file and reg clean with Ccleaner.

This should remove whatever malware the software may have installed.

Finally if you are having random reboots then have you looked in your Administrative event viewer inside your Control Panal to look at the error code given each time the PC reboots?.

"The only way to clean a compromised system is to flatten and rebuild."
Jesper M. Johansson, Ph.D., CISSP, MCSE, MCP+I

Security Program Manager
Microsoft Corporation
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/com...mt/sm0504.mspx
Yes, this is a statement from Microsoft.

Michael