LostInTechnology

How To Get Rid of a Computer Virus

Posted on 20. Jul, 2009 by Bryan.Castleberry in How To, Windows

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Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a computer virus (yes, you in the back; you know you have.) It can happen to anyone regardless of how you count your clicks or monitor your emails, and as frustrating as it can be, it doesn’t always mean you’ve got to go drop a few C-notes at a local repair shop or Best Buy.

With a little time and effort you can be back up and running in no time! First, you need to asses the situation and decide whether to do a backup and fresh-install, or if your current setup is worth fighting for.

In this guide, we are going to show you how to remove that virus without having to reformat your computer.

Let’s Get Started

Doing a cleanup on a virus-ridden computer can be very time intensive and frustrating, point-blank, but there are times when it’s not. Performing a cleanup can be a better solution than a fresh install for a variety of reasons; you don’t have to spend time putting everything back where it goes, and you don’t have to tear the closet out of the wall looking for CDs to all the software you’ve undoubtedly amassed over the months/years.

For a cleanup you will need:

1. Time
2. Cleaning programs
3. Patience
4. The ability to search Google

Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware

Generally to clean up a computer, you will need a good virus scanner and a few good anti-spyware programs.  These programs will seek out all the junk that has somehow found its way onto your computer.

My favorite anti-virus software is a freeware called AVG.  It updates daily and if you schedule its daily scan for the middle of the night when you’re not using the computer, you’ll hardly ever know it’s there. Another good solution for virus protection is called ESet, although it’s not free.

A few of the anti-malware programs we use at the PC repair shop I work for include Malware-Bytes, Spybot, ASquared Free, and SUPERAntiSpyware. Oh, and CCleaner too. One last thing you will need is called HijackThis. It’s a pretty simple program designed to help you delete startup entries. This is significant because if you recognize a virus and delete its startup entry, it won’t be loaded when you boot your computer, and you can use this tool to speed your boot times in general.

Get Rid of That Virus

So now that you’ve got all these weird sounding programs downloaded and installed we can get to cleaning. First thing’s first, run CCleaner to get rid of all the temporary files on your machine. This will only take a few minutes, and it can free up quite a bit of space on your drive, which can also help with the overall speed of your system if you drive is nearly full.

Next, run HijackThis by opening the program and clicking ‘Do a scan only.’ You’ll see a pretty long list of startup items appear over the next few minutes. This step may need not apply if you’re not generally familiar with what should and should not be running on your computer, but this would be a good time to comb through the list and get rid of any annoying programs that pop up when you boot the computer. To do so just tick the box next to an entry and click ‘fix checked’ when you’ve got everything selected you want to get rid of. When you’re finished make sure you reboot.

Scanning Your Computer

If your computer’s not infected too bad, you can usually get by with running Spybot and Malware-Bytes, but more serious infections will sometimes require the use of all the aforementioned scanners and sometimes possibly more. For the best results, run each scanner independently on it’s most intensive scan (deep scan with malware-bytes, for instance), tell it to remove/delete any unwanted objects it may find, and then reboot. Do this until all the different scanners are unable to find any unwanted items.

OK, so you’ve sat through hours of scans and they’re all FINALLY coming back negative.. now what? At this point, you’re basically done.  You may want to brag to your friends you were able to bring your computer back to life.

But My Computer’s Still Acting Funny

This is where Google comes in. Maybe you’re missing the tab that lets you change your screensaver or wallpaper, or Internet Explorer still doesn’t want to act just quite right. Try searching Google with a few key words. Instead of asking “Why can’t i see the tab to change my wallpaper?” you’d be better off searching with “wallpaper tab missing,” or something of the like.

Still not back to normal? Stay tuned for my next post on performing a fresh install!

(By) Bryan Castleberry can be found on Facebook.

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Tags: fresh install, How To, viruses, Windows