remove Viruses and Spyware

Removing viruses and spyware is possible. With that said, it is more likely you will not be able to remove them without a lot of hard work and the possibility of causing damage to your Operating System. First course of action for an extremely infected computer shoulf be to backup important data and reformat and reinstall.

Why Reformat and Reinstall?
While you might be able to eventually remove the virus, it could take hours or even days. If you take the computer to a specialist, it could cost a fortune to rid the machine of malware. So if you have the ability to reformat and reinstall, it will normally be faster and cheaper than removing the virus.

Preventing Virus and Spyware Infection on Your PC
Prevention is always the best defense against malware. You need to make sure your computer is up to date by visiting the Mircosoft Update site every couple of weeks. But you should really enable automatic updates so critical updates can be downloaded and installed immediately. This is available in XP SP2 and later versions of Windows.

You should also be running as a limited user rather than admin. Limited user accounts will have lower access to critical system files, meaning the viruses also have lower access to areas of your computer. In a lot of cases, this can reduce or prevent many infections.

Lastly, you should be running an antivirus that is current. Since new viruses come out daily, you need to make sure your PC is protected. We have listing to free and commercial software in our computer software downloads section.

Removing Viruses
The first thing you’ll want to do is disable System Restore. If a virus has the ability to restore itself, removal is useless. You can do this by going to right-clicking My Computer, then select Properties. Under the System Restore tab, check Turn Off System Restore on All Drives. You should then reboot into Safe Mode and run your Antivirus scanner.

Removing Spyware
You should follow the same steps for removing viruses. There are special programs that target spyware. We programs like Spybot Search and Destroy and Adaware. Both of these can also be found in our computer software downloads section. In addition to running these programs, you might also consider downloading an alternate web browser, such as Firefox or Opera. If you have spyware on your system, it could be targeting only Internet Explorer. Running an alternate browser might allow you to get online to download software and tools to help you eliminate the infection.

Run Hijack This When All Else Fails
Hijack This is a more advanced program that helps remove malware that other programs miss or cannot remove. The log file this program generates should be examined by someone familiar with them, as removing the incorrect entries from HJT can cause damage to your system.