Last week I heard a twitter friend in distress, She had lost all her screen icons and the Start Menu Programs were missing. I immediately recognised this as a familiar sign of a virus attack on her computer, We tried a few things over the next few hours to get her system back, (not being helped by the fact I was working through twitter) but there comes a time when you need to say enough is enough and move on to another plan, such as a system repair, reinstall or reimage. An Image is a complete copy of your system with all the programs and data contained that you have made at a previous date.
Of course if there was valuable data involved that had not been backed up you would keep on persevering until all hope was lost, luckily this person kept regular backups of her data. It took a good 24hrs before the system was back up and running, and all the programs and applications are still being gathered together and reloaded.
I think the most annoying part is that this person was using a very "big" brand antivirus, and it failed her completely.
This next piece of advice is purely my own opinion, but I have only paid for antivirus once, and I had grief with it. There are some very good free antivirus products out there and used in conjunction with a free malware product,is a very successful combination.
If you are running Windows 7,or Windows Vista, Microsoft has its own very good antivirus called Microsoft Security Essentials, if you do a search on that name you will find it quite easily. Microsoft also puts out a Malicious Software Removal tool every month with the latest updates, this is downloaded with your usual updates, but needs to be run manually. To run the Malicious Removal Tool, type: mrt.exe into the "run box" (the white box in the lower left corner of your screen, when you click on the start button) this will find the program for you and then just click on it to run it.
There are plenty of other free good products, with a few of the popular ones being "Avast", "Avira", and "Avg". I run one of these in conjunction with a program called "Malwarebytes", it is a very respected program in the IT world and is also free. Malwarebytes needs to be run manually to do a scan, another good option is that, you can right click on any file and scan it with Malwarebytes before opening it up. I try and run a full system scan with it once a week, and it will always tell you when an update is available for download.
The rest is up to your own online behaviour and browsing habits, but I have been using the above mentioned combination for years with out issues, the antivirus product should always warn you if you happen to land on a dangerous web page.
The last advice I will give is to go to your "backup and restore" in the control panel, then choose the option of creating a rescue disc, once you have done that, choose "create a system image", make sure you save to a hard drive separate to the one you are using for your computers system. This is for Windows Vista and 7, if you need help with any other systems, just drop me a line and I will help you out.
Of course if there was valuable data involved that had not been backed up you would keep on persevering until all hope was lost, luckily this person kept regular backups of her data. It took a good 24hrs before the system was back up and running, and all the programs and applications are still being gathered together and reloaded.
I think the most annoying part is that this person was using a very "big" brand antivirus, and it failed her completely.
This next piece of advice is purely my own opinion, but I have only paid for antivirus once, and I had grief with it. There are some very good free antivirus products out there and used in conjunction with a free malware product,is a very successful combination.
If you are running Windows 7,or Windows Vista, Microsoft has its own very good antivirus called Microsoft Security Essentials, if you do a search on that name you will find it quite easily. Microsoft also puts out a Malicious Software Removal tool every month with the latest updates, this is downloaded with your usual updates, but needs to be run manually. To run the Malicious Removal Tool, type: mrt.exe into the "run box" (the white box in the lower left corner of your screen, when you click on the start button) this will find the program for you and then just click on it to run it.
There are plenty of other free good products, with a few of the popular ones being "Avast", "Avira", and "Avg". I run one of these in conjunction with a program called "Malwarebytes", it is a very respected program in the IT world and is also free. Malwarebytes needs to be run manually to do a scan, another good option is that, you can right click on any file and scan it with Malwarebytes before opening it up. I try and run a full system scan with it once a week, and it will always tell you when an update is available for download.
The rest is up to your own online behaviour and browsing habits, but I have been using the above mentioned combination for years with out issues, the antivirus product should always warn you if you happen to land on a dangerous web page.
The last advice I will give is to go to your "backup and restore" in the control panel, then choose the option of creating a rescue disc, once you have done that, choose "create a system image", make sure you save to a hard drive separate to the one you are using for your computers system. This is for Windows Vista and 7, if you need help with any other systems, just drop me a line and I will help you out.
3 comments:
Ahhh that was me *blush* Thanks for that! To be honest, I stopped using MSE and upgraded to that other one cause I was told MSE wouldn't stop a fly... ahhh. Wrong.
Great article thankyou
Hey Lori, I think MSE is a lot better now than in its early days, its all a personal thing but, there is good and bad stories about most things.
Thanks Debyl1, I'm glad you enjoyed it. If there is anything else you would ever like to know about, just let me know.
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