Is my Macbook Pro sick? (please be gentle)

[JohnnyOlbash]

Okay, so clearly I am new here. I apologize in advance if there is a more appropriate forum for this or if this topic is not appropriate period.

My friends are always telling me to go to this questionable website or that one because there is something I have just got to see. I usually do not; this time however I fell for it.

I went to the website and a pop-up window came up in the lower-right of my screen. It said something to the effect of: "Hey there, I see you are in Boston, so am I... let's chat"

So automatically I figure there is something wrong since they know where I am. (How do they do that?!)

So I went to close out of the window, but instead I clicked just below the "x" and as a result I was redirected to some site that I immediately closed.


In the weeks since this happened: I have a lot of trouble connecting to the internet. Pages don't load properly, pages do not load at all.

I cannot count the number of times I have seen the message: "Failed to connect to website.com. Though the website seems valid... blah blah.."

I really need to get this working again. This is my computer for school and as an Engineering student, I really need it!

Any ideas are greatly appreciated.
JohnnyO

P.S. Though the timing seems as such, I am not absolutely sure that all this trouble started at the same time as the website incident.

 

[TodVader]

Repair the permissions with disk utility. This might fix everything. They know where you are with your IP. You never saw those ads from adultfinder what say meet girls in 'city name'? They are eeeeeverywhere.

 

[synth3tik]

clear your cache and cookies. It is spam. You'll see it a lot on places like Myspace and the like.

 

[iToaster]

Click on "Reset Safari" in the Safari menu. Also, the whole "I see you're from 'whatever city'" thing is done with your IP address which give a general location.

 

[JohnnyOlbash]

I have already tried clearing Safari and Mozilla. I have also done the Repair Permissions thing (though I don't know what it is, it just sounded good at the time and I am still having sufficient problems with the connection.

Like as I am typing this, every single button on this page (e.g. the bold and italics button) turned into a little blue box with a question mark in it!

It is constantly doing this.

 

[synth3tik]

When resetting everything you may have removed or otherwise modified your DNS server setting. This would be in system prefs under network.

 

[JohnnyOlbash]

When resetting everything you may have removed or otherwise modified your DNS server setting. This would be in system prefs under network.

I do not know what this means. But I went to sys pref and chose network and I do not see anything weird. I clicked on diagnostics and it ran a check and said everything is operating normally.

 

[JohnnyOlbash]

This is all I am seeing.

And it just took me a half-hour to view this page!

Any other fixes you can think of? This is killing me.

 

[TodVader]

If this is taking too much time to fix, I suggest you backup and do a OS reinstall. At least tomorow your computer will be fine at school.