Virus Removal and Prevention

Your computer is running slowly, pop-ups appear everywhere and prevent you from doing anything, warnings appear all over your screen. The chances are you have a virus.

In this article we'll discuss the ways you can remove viruses and most importantly prevent re-infection on your computer

Computer viruses are one of the most common problems I have come across as a computer technician. I use this as a general term also encompassing malware, spyware, ransomware, worms, trojans etc. Basically these are nasty bits of software that someone out there has written to sabotage your computer, make money or get information from your PC.

The question people always ask is how did I get a virus? The truth is these days you can get viruses from many places including email attachments, online downloads (especially those of questionable legality such as cracked software or illegal film and music downloads) websites specifically designed to distribute malware and viruses and websites that have been infected by viruses. In the end though how you got a virus is not all that important it's getting rid of them that is the primary concern.

Viruses come in all shapes and sizes, some will quietly beaver away in the background covertly performing their dastardly deeds whilst others will render your computer completely unusable. In the best case scenario you will come across a virus that can simply be removed by running a virus scan, if you don't have any virus software you can get some great software for free from www.dowload.com AVG and AVAST are both very good at getting rid of most viruses.

Many viruses are a bit more devious and prevent virus software from running or even stop your computer from booting altogether. The first thing to try is booting to safe mode. To do this turn on your computer and press the F8 key until you are presented with the Advanced Boot Options menu. You should try booting to "Safe Mode with Networking" this should allow you to update your anti-virus software via the internet and run a virus scan or if you don't have anti-virus software you should be able to download one as described earlier.

The important thing to remember when removing viruses is that the first virus scan may not completely remove the virus so always keep running scans until your anti-virus software shows that no viruses are present. This may take some time and require several reboots to complete but be patient and keep going and your computer should be back up and running.

Sometimes a virus infects Windows in ways that once removed may cause the operating system not function correctly. This is usually down to changes the virus has made to something called the registry, this is essentially a huge register that lets Windows know where everything is and how and what all the software and hardware in the computer does. If you're lucky a free registry cleaner (see www.dowload.com) may solve these issues but in most cases you will need to go in and edit the registry yourself. Unless you're very confident in editing the registry I would not recommend doing this as deleting or changing entries can cause serious problems and even render your computer unusable. Your best bet in these cases is to get a computer technician in to sort the problem.

So if the above methods have helped you get rid of a virus how do you prevent your computer from getting one again? The truth is no matter how much virus protection you place on your computer whether it is free or paid for someone, somewhere will have a virus out there that can get round it. However this does not mean that you shouldn't have virus protection as this is essential. To get the best of your anti-virus software make sure you always keep it updated and run regular scans.

Even though viruses can get round the best anti-virus programs there are many things you can do to avoid these viruses, most anti-virus software now has something called a link scanner, this basically puts an indicator next to your search results in: google, bing, yahoo etc. to show how safe a website is. Usually a green tick or something similar to the right of the link will tell you a site is safe to visit and virus-free, a yellow indicator will tell you it's a bit dodgy and a red indicator will mean don't go there it has viruses.

Always keep your internet browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari etc.) up to date as the latest security updates will plug any identified gaps and bugs that virus writers will try to exploit. The same goes for any add-ons in your browsers such as Flash or Java. Also always keep up with the latest Windows Operating System updates.

Whenever you download any file whether via email or an internet browser, right-click on the file after it has been downloaded and select the option to scan the file with your anti-virus software before you open it.

If you follow these tips I cannot promise that you will never get a virus but if you do, then the chances are vastly increased that your computer will stay clean and virus free.