Beware of Spyware and viruses!

[Gumby]

Wow, been without my computer for a bit. Just had Avira antivirus, and found out how woefully lacking it could be/was. Everytime I tried to rid my self of this virus/spyware stuff, it kept getting nastier and nastier. I hope I finally have it licked now. But I still have my doubts. I upgraded to Microsoft Security Essentials, and ran Windows Defender Offline, and still had like 409 suspicious/malicious infestations that MSE didn't catch. Redirects, system shutdowns and loss of files and hard drive space. It's a dangerous world out there. I'm learning more about computers that I never wanted to know.

[purple1]

Never, and I mean never trust just one anti virus program. My laptop computer is loaded with Ubuntu Linux. No problems with virus/malware programs here. It came with widows vista, but I never use it. Set it to dual boot with Linux and never looked back. The nasties will get on your windows computer and go get a bunch of there friends. Remove one and 5 more get loaded. Some times the only way to get rid of all the crap is to reload the computers from scratch.

My best advice is to get it as clean as you can. Back up all data you want to keep. Then reload the computer from the recovery disk if you can. Don't just reinstall. Wipe it and re-format the hard drive. Then run recovery.If you don't want to reload then go buy a good anti virus program. Download and install Malwarebytes, Super Antispyware, Ad-Aware, and run them all.

Computers are the investment that keeps on costing. Good luck.

[4Cruizn]

Everyone has their own way of dealing with the nasties . . . I have 35 computers that I maintain that have 50 people using them that don't know anything about computers. . . .or think they do and that can be worse.  I currently run AVG free version anti virus with a defrag program and a junk clean up program.  If something gets into a system, go in and clean it out or dump everything and reload.  Sometimes it is easier to do the reload than waste time trying to purge it out.

[hpe600rt]