You are working on your computer. Suddenly you feel that something is wrong with your computer. Chances are that your system has been infected with malware. They are programs designed to run undetected in the background. To tell the difference, look for whether advertising pop-ups appear every few seconds, there is an extra toolbars in your browser that won’t go away, your home page won’t open anymore, and your system has slowed down with system crashes very often. If your answer is yes to all of these, it is high time you treat your PC for infection by checking it out thoroughly. Although there may be other reasons as to why your system might slow down or frequently crash, if you are not taking notice of all these obvious indications of malware, your system might have been compromised!
Follow these simple guidelines to protect your PC from any such threat and clean it up if it has already been infected.
Step1: Install Anti-Spyware, Anti-Virus Software on your computer and update them regularly.
Step 2: No sooner than you suspect that some malware has infected your computer; remove it from the network to prevent further spreading of the malware to the other computer on the network. Run antivirus program installed on your computer.
Step 3: If you do not have any antivirus program, try getting Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware , Spybot S&D and Grisoft AVG Free. You download each of the above programs and then install them on your computer. As spyware is a bigger problem today than viruses, and spyware is typically harder to find and get rid of, I suggest you to start looking for spyware first.
Step 4: You also need to turn off System Restore feature in Window since it may be the case that it is unable to tell the difference between an infected file and a good file, and automatically restore an infected file. Thus it can re-infect your computer. Hence, it is recommended to turn off System Restore before you start test, and when you’re finished, turn it back on in order to be still protected from standard computer problems.
Step 5: Now Run Disk Clean-Up utility. You can access it by clicking the Start Button and then going to Programs / Accessories / System Tools / Disk Clean-up.
Step 6: Now you need to run CWShredder which detects and cleans the infamous CoolWebSearch exploits. After that, run Ad-Aware which handles the next toughest types the best. When finally the list of parasites is displayed, put a check mark in the box next to the ones you want to get rid of. It is good if you check them all.
Step 7: Your next step will be to run Spybot .When it is run, it will automatically select all the spyware that it finds. If for any reason there is something you don’t want to get rid of, deselect it and then let Spybot fix all of the rest of the problems that it finds. You will also be asked by this program to restart your computer so it can test again if it has problems removing something, so let it.
