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What to Do Once You Are Infected with Spyware, Ad-ware or Viruses

What to do once your PC is infected with spyware, ad-ware or viruses

So you've been running a virus program. Or you haven't. (Check my previous article on keeping your computer at top speed by using Avast). Either way, your PC is now infected by spyware/ad-ware, or even worse, a virus. What DO you do?

The easiest method, is, of course, to format. Should you turn on your PC and the infestation is so bad (and some of them are) you need to format, simply slide a windows xp cd you've either bought or burned into your rom drive, re-boot, and go through windows installation. Don't forget to enter your BIOS/CMOS and change your boot sequence so your cd-rom drive boots before your hard drive.

If you've just got a small problem; your computer still runs fine, then you can just clean up your hard drive with any number of programs. There are many out there, but the ones I suggest would be Spybot: Search and Destroy, Lavasoft ad-aware, and Avast Anti-Virus.

All of these programs are free and can be downloaded off download.com . Likely the most user-friendly program would be Avast or Ad-aware. Spybot is a little more of an advanced program. It is still one of the best, but if you have trouble understanding PC problems, you might have troubles understanding how Spybot works. (You could always read the readmes or their forums, however). Microsoft has also released a new program too, which can be downloaded from download.com as well, or whatever your favorite download portal is.

Anyways, once you have one of these programs, start a scan and attempt to remove the infestation. Most of these programs can also schedule a boot time scan. This means your computer will reboot and scan before you load windows. This can help remove most infestations because most spyware/ad-ware/viruses can manifest themselves in windows so well that they cannot be deleted unless you delete them before windows loads or from safe mode.

A boot-time scan is recommended as the first course of action to remove your infestation. Should you continue to experience slower PC speeds, you could try using a virus scanner to not only scan your hard drive, but prevent your PC from getting more spyware. Usually with spyware, once you have even a few files infected, they spread like a virus and attempt to propogate themselves. It's important you have a virus scanner to not only delete old spyware, but prevent new spyware from popping up. Avast is great for this.

Anyways, good luck and good hunting. Use a format as your last course of action. Besides, it's good for your PC at least once a year to format. This re-aligns your partition tables and eliminates corruption as well as fragmentation.

I am a young, aspiring computer engineer into Internet Marketing, hardware, software, web design, SEO and just about anything related to computers. Please come check out my growing PC forum at http://www.markspcforum.com

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Yahoo! News Search Results for hardware
Yahoo! News Search Results for hardware

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Quiz to assess learners? hardware knowledge, created in Word 2007; it may work in other versions but not on Macs. Macros must be enabled for the program to automatically mark the answers & print the learner's first attempt. Please leave feedback. If you have any problems send a message via TES site.
• Hardware stores hit by falling business
THE STATE (COLUMBIA, S.C.) COLUMBIA, S.C. - For three years, Terry Reynolds has watched sales dwindle at his West Columbia, S.C., ACE Hardware store. And he has mourned as other South Carolina hardware stores have chained their doors for the last time - including three that are closing in the next few weeks in Richland and Lexington, S.C. "We get tired of fighting and trying to survive," Mr ...
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Tripping the light fantastic Security researchers using hardware hacking techniques have unearthed generic flaws in supposedly ultra-secure quantum cryptography systems.?
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