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Cleaning Viruses 101

Posted by Ryan on July 22, 2007 in Windows

This is a walkthrough of my recommended way of getting rid of those stinky viruses bogging down/exploiting your computer. In most situations this should be enough to clean up your machine, however after a certain point, with certain viruses or when multiple viruses are present on a computer you will need a 2nd machine to clean up the mess. But for now lets assume that you will be able to take care of the problem with just the one machine.

First you need to make sure you have a virus scanner with up-to-date virus definitions. If you need a virus scanner, I have listed two on the page called “Free Software List” (top left).

Second, I would recommend that you disable the Windows’ “System Restore” feature..Although a good feature included with Windows XP, it can make a backup of the viruses we are trying to remove. Right-Click on “My Computer”, “Properties”, “System Restore”, “Turn off System Restore”, select “Apply” and “Ok”.

Third you need to reboot your computer into Safe Mode. You do this by rebooting your computer and pressing the F5 button when it begins to boot, this is before you see the Windows splash screen (which would be before you see a login screen or the desktop). Safe Mode is a necessary step because this will bring Windows up with the a minimum set of services started which inturn also minimizes the possibility of viruses starting.

Ok now you are ready to do some house cleaning!

I’m going to use AVG virus scan as an example, to run a scan on your local machine select “AVG test center” and select “Scan Computer”. This will run a scan on your local disk which will hopefully find any viruses lurking on your PC. The viruses that it does find you can choose to delete, move to vault, or heal (clean). I would suggest trying to first “heal” any files that it does find to be infected before deleting. Unfortunetely viruses have a tendency to infect system files that, if deleted, could render your system unuseable. As always, please be careful of what you delete.

Once the scan is done and you have cleaned/deleted the offending files, run another scan to ensure that the system is clean. After this, you’re ready to reboot into Normal Mode and turn the “System Restore” back on.

Ok hope this helps! Please let me know if you need me to provide more details on any portion.