TechTips Vol III Windows – Virus Removal
If you have never gotten a virus on your Windows computer, you are either one of the very lucky minority, a computer genius, or still running Windows 3.1. If you don’t fall into any of the above categories, read on…
Safe Computer Rules to Live By
- Backup your computer
- As often as you can use Google Chrome over Internet Explorer for web browsing.
- Don’t open or click on email links or email attachments you are unsure of.
- Even if they are from someone you know
- If it is not something you are expecting, and you can live without it, best to just delete.
- This applies to facebook, twitter, etc. links and messages as well.
- Always have an Antivirus program running on your computer
Virus Removal
Even if you practice extremely safe computing, there’s no guarantee you will stay virus free. The best thing you can do is restore your computer from an image backup. However, you may not have a backup or the backup is so old, you would lose a lot of data. Besides prayer, below are some steps you can take to eradicate said intruder.
- Download the below programs on another computer, and save them to a USB stick.
- Combo Fix. Rename the combofix.exe download to fixprogram.exe
- Spybot Search and Destroy
- Malware Bytes
- Plug the USB stick into the infected computer
- Copy Combofix, Spybot, and Malware bytes off the USB stick onto the infected machine
- Run Combofix first
- Don’t do anything while it is running
- If it tells you to disable your antivirus, ignore it, hit ok.
- When it prompts you for downloads, etc. agree to them.
- Install and run Spybot, then Malwarebytes
- Run your antivirus software scanner
- After you have done all this, just to be safe, rinse, lather, repeat. Run all four one more time.
- Finally, check to make sure your antivirus software is on the latest available version. If not, download or purchase it.