Windows 10: someone else upgraded my win10 home to win10 pro. i think he opened the door for hacking....

Hello.


I have been working on this a long time.


About three years ago someone who lived here updated my pc from either win7 or win10 home to win10pro. settings>system>about shows win10 home. However, some items in the left vertical list of programs are different from win10 style. When I get to control panel, I see an item backup and restore windows 7.


This happens on both this pc, an HP, and on my surface pro 4.


The reason that I think this is malware is that the first symptom was that images would change over time. Not videos. .jpg and any other still images. Friends I tried to show this thought I was nuts. It's subtle. I finally figured out two ways to prove it was happening. one of the ways was to install gimp. it allows me to open two images and to subtract one from the other, pixel by pixel. I did the obvious. Take one full screen snip using the microsoft tool, save it then set it read-only. then wait a couple hours and do the same thing, but not set read-only. Load the two into gimp and subtract them. raising contrast showed details, not the gray or black screen I would expect if the images were identical or if i loaded two copies of the same image file and subtracted them which I did and always saw gray screen.


Still images are not supposed to change. Mine do.


Now, over that much time I came to understand that there's a thing called rendering. So I do not know if the rendering process is causing this or if the image files are changing. My worry is that if whatever is changing the image can change files, it can change any file. And maybe read them. I absolutely do not trust this setup with any financial or private information. That makes win10 useless.


So, either it is not hacked, in which case win10 is innately useless, which I doubt that you believe, or there's a hack.


I've messed with some settings, but that seems to have improved things some. The problem began before I played with settings.


Although it's odd to me that I have win10 home, let's just assume for the moment that the "about" screen is right and that's what i really do have.


I cannot access my local user or administrator folders, and that is apparently ok with win10. I read the help files i found regarding that so i get that the non-built-in Administrator and User folders are better. Fine.


What about the other local folders? I do not know what is in them.


I suspect that this guy who did the upgrade set something up to facilitate this problem happening. There was a page on task scheduler with his name as an author. Before my first reinstall of windows, I got a pic of it and also found a .json file with his name in it. I think that file is what the page generated, but not sure.


I backed up my personal files and who knows what else onto a big usb drive. Then I did a clean restore from microsoft website. I seemed to be reinstalling the wrong file. I repeated it and same thing. gigantic 55 GB disk space taken after only install and updates plus install of Kaspersky security cloud.



I asked a microsoft tech to remote in and she did. She found the right file and sent it to my pc. I follwed directions and made a bootable installation usb drive. I figured that was safe.


I did a clean install with that. After that I noticed that a file, one level below C:\, named Program Data was there. That's where Kaspersky went after install.


After a few days, that folder was no longer there. Kaspersky avi.exe, the cloud security exe, was in the x86 folder. following the few shortcuts from my taskbar and desktop, I saw that they took slightly diffferent routes but ended up of course pointing at the .exe.


That in itself seems fairly odd.


I also applied the usb drive install to my surface.


The problem returned to both machines. It also affected my android phone.


So I figured that whtever it is managed to use wifi or the phone to spread the problem.


Next step, turned all devices off. Factory reset the phone first since i would need that for 2-factor. Then installed win10 into both pcs from usb drive, with wifi off for all devices.


I did not think to turn bluetooth off.


Cranked everything up and things are again strange, though improved.


Last night I was using my surface. I went to shut down and I saw a message saying that another user was signed in and that if i continued data could be lost. What did i care? I shut it down. Then I powered up aftrer a minute and shut down again. Thsi time the announcement was a bit different. that there might be other users and data could be lost.


I dont' know about you, but I don't care for other users accessing my pc. I do not run an online business. I don't have any reason to imagine that another user should be seen by win10. But that doesnt' matter. It does so whether I like it or not.


I need this fixed.


I saw another post that seemed to describe the exact same thing. That guy was advised to do pretty much what I did. He claimed 30 years in IT.


What i would like to happen is this. It is possible that you would immediately recognize a problem that I can only feel around for the answer. I would like for you to remote inand look. If the settings i have changed to try to choke this off confuse you, I will reinstall and wait a few days, then ask you to remote in again to see if things look right.


As it sits, both PCs have lost my trust.

:)

 

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