<p>As reluctant as I am to brag [/lie], I am currently basking in the glow of seeing the end of a hard-fought battle with numerous computer viruses and having emerged - apparently - triumphant.</p>
<p>My family hates anti-spyware programs (they slow everything down) and my kids have resisted my suggestions that they allow me to install something on their laptops “just in case.” Well, this Spring, the inevitable happened. S2 called us up with the news that his laptop had been rendered unusable because of a plethora of viruses and other malicious software which had somehow found its way into and taken possession of his machine. I swapped with him and brought his Toshiba home. What a mess! The little #$$<em>$# had shut off access to Task Manager and registry editor and a program froze the browser if I tried to go online to any helpful sites. It would barely do anything at all and what it did do was evil. With the blare of the phony “virus warnings” trying to trick me into buying a virus to install (“Antivirus 2009”) popping up constantly, I was tempted to nuke the whole thing and start over with a system reinstallation, losing all the installed software, music, pictures and other datafiles he’d accumulated over the past three years. But I thought I’d give it a try, and the first task was to get into the #$%^</em>& machine so I could start to fight back. Once I got in (three days later) my first scan found over thirty malicious programs running.</p>
<p>…Long story short - six days later, it’s clean and his music and other data files are all still there. <a href=“We%20are%20the%20champions,%20my%20friend…%20We’ll%20keep%20on%20fighting,%20till%20the%20end…%20we%20are%20the%20champions,%20we%20are%20the%20champions…”>I</a> * Ah, sweet victory! It’s good to win one every once in a while.</p>
<p>A tip - Malwarebytes.org 's MBAM is awesome. It got stuff other programs couldn’t touch.</p>
<p>I’m running a Malwarebytes scan now - it usually takes about four hours to run. I also run Ad-Aware, S S&D and Windows Defender and Avast. This is all on a desktop. One of these days, I’ll upgrade the thing to a Core i7 like my systems at the office. You can load those down with a lot of anti-malware programs and the things are so fast that you won’t even notice any performance dropoff.</p>
<p>For laptops I like to run Mac OSX. I have Windows dual-boot for when I need Windows and have the anti-malware stuff there too. I don’t keep much on the Windows partitions so scans don’t take that long. We have mostly converted to Macs for laptops. Security issues are only one of the motivations.</p>
<p>she raises her hand as a backup nerd. I copy the entire My Documents folder to a HD every few weeks. I also backup my email including contacts, bookmarks, and firefox profile</p>
<p>Just bought 2 Click frees the past week–one for me, one for D. Great product, whoever it was who brought it to our attention. Now I can back up my computer without a second thought.</p>
<p>I also swear by MWB, Ad-Aware, and I happen to use AVG instead of Avast- both are great antiviral programs. Since installing them a while ago,and ditching the paid programs, I have NEVER have any virus, spyware or malware problems, and I notice no loss of speed at all because of these programs. I too have had to fix a couple of infested computers belonging to others, as well as reinstall the OP systems. All in all, it can be very time consuming, but gratifying when you know you have solved a big problem!</p>
<p>I got into an infested computer by restoring it to a date prior to when it was infested, and then installed and ran malwarebites .</p>
<p>Thanks, MPM. I have a friend with an infected computer, and I had planned to download MWBytes and run the scan. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember what the password was to hook her computer up to her wireless network. She’s also been having trouble with her cable/internet provider, which has slowed everything down.</p>
<p>I tried to boot up using a Linux CD with an anti-malware program (you can download this from Avira) but was unsuccessful. I eventually got in by booting up in safe mode and logging on as “Administrator,” which bypassed the task manager block. Then I could identify the process which was blocking network access and end it long enough to download Avast!, and later MBAM. (It reloaded itself right away but there was a brief window of opportunity when I could get through.) Avast! wasn’t able to deal with the worst problems - even though it deleted dozens of viruses, they would reinstall as fast as they were taken out. MBAM re-enabled the registry editor function so the really nasty stuff could be dug out. Clamwin is still showing a handful of suspicious files but I think they’re false positives. </p>
<p>I abandoned McAfee and Norton long ago. They are really intrusive, in my experience, and I really dislike the way they nag you after you buy a system with a trial program pre-installed. AVG was better, but even it was too much hassle for Mrs. Kluge. I think Avast! is less intrusive; I’m also trying Avira on another machine.</p>
<p>There’s a report of a new virus out there called Gumbler which is a lot worse than Conficker. It attacks websites instead of client computers to infect sites that then infect client computers. The result is that you can get infected from visiting an innocent website that has been infected.</p>