How To Remove Malware and Viruses From Your PC

Malware is the scourge of the Internet to the extent that Google discovers over 9,500 new malicious web sites and provides 300,000 download warnings every day. Once installed, malware either feeds you advertising, feeds your browsing activity back to advertisers as profiling information, or if you’re really unlucky it waits for you to visit your online banking site and redirects you off to a malicious web site where it will collect your login details.

How Do You Know You Have Malware On Your PC?

When you start to see browser windows popping up with advertising messages for no apparent reason, you can be pretty sure that you have some malware on your PC. Otherwise, you may not see any visible sign of malware other than your PC grinding gradually to a halt. It turns out that malware is very sociable and once it finds a home on your PC, it will usually invite a few friends over to party! By the time that the malware party on your PC is in full swing, you will find that it takes forever to boot up, shut down, or open any application. That’s usually the time when you reach for the phone to call in your IT support company!

My Top 3 Malware Removal Tools

There are 3 tools that you can turn to when you think you have malware on your PC:

• Spybot Search and Destroy – Probably the most popular malware scanner – includes real time scanning.

• Malwarebytes – My personal favourite malware removal software.

• Combofix – If all else fails, try Combofix. It provides heavy-duty malware removal.

Malwarebytes has been my preferred malware removal tool for some time now.  Usually it will find whatever is on the PC and removes it in one full scan, although I always recommend running 2 scans to make sure that you haven’t got some “smart” malware which includes a hidden component that reinstalls itself whenever it finds that the main program has been deleted.

Sometimes however you will come across an infected PC that proves impossible to clean. When that happens, you just have to back up your data if you can and reach for the Windows installation DVD to reinstall.

How To Stop Malware Getting Onto Your PC

Malware finds its way onto your PC when you visit a compromised web site. If your PC is not kept 100% up to date with the latest security patches, criminals and cyber-scoundrels are able to exploit bugs in older versions of programs to plant their software on your PC.

Unfortunately there is no easy way of telling good web sites from bad ones. Diligence in IT maintenance combined with robust IT Security really is your only defence, and if you don’t have the time to take these tasks on yourself, then you really need to find an IT support company who can help you.