Virus, trojans and other malware removal

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One of the great scourges of the computer age is the computer virus. There have been thousands of them since the 1980s. The slideshow above contains screenshots of some of the more famous ones. Viruses, worms, hoaxes, malware, trojans, spyware, scareware, adware, ransomware and a host of other names have caused countless hours of frustration, lost time and productivity and cost billions of dollars around the world.

Some of it is malicious, designed for espionage or sabotage to other governments or corporations. Some of it is designed for financial gain, attempting to fool the affected user into buying the full version of the “program” to remove fake viruses, when it itself IS the virus. Some malware installs itself on an infected computer and uses it as a host to infect other PCs and running bot programs that can log keystrokes and record information like passwords and bank details. Other nuisance programs change search engines in web browsers, pop up constantly annoying ads and slow down the computer. Some of it is written by people with too much time on their hands or wanting to “prove” their programming prowess.

It is important to keep up to date with Microsoft Security updates and have reliable and reputable Antivirus software installed. At Craig the Computer Geek, we believe that you get what you pay for when it comes to AV software and recommend a commercial solution from vendors like Symantec, Kaspersky, Trend Micro, etc. Microsoft Security Essentials is free software and does a reasonable job as does AVG and avast but these are cut down versions of a full antivirus solution.

Virus removal can be time consuming, with multiple scans sometimes needed to remove the infections. Sometimes the hard drive needs to be removed completely and scanned from another computer as the infected computer has been too badly compromised.