How To Eradicate Malware On Your PC
Malicious software is sometimes referred to as malware. This software has very harmful impacts on the computer it resides in. There are many sources that your computer could get malware infection from. It could be your floppy drive, CD drive, pen drive, internet, or some other external source. Internet is by far the most common and talked about source of malware. In a most commonly set up trap, you would get a warning popup asking you to check your computer for virus. You would be offered a free scan for the same. Once you accept the offer, there will be more pop ups coming up asking you to install a free anti virus software. Sometimes you may be asked to pay for the so called anti virus as well. You would therefore end up infecting your computer and also paying for the same.
Such malicious programs are called scareware. A study conducted by Microsoft has reported that scareware is installed on more than 4.4 million computers. Some of the known scareware programs are Personal antivirus, XP antivirus, DriveCleaner, RapidAntiVirus, Antivirus’09, and WiPC antivirus. You must be careful of such malware.
How to fight the malware? In case your computer is suffering with malware, you may want to read on to discover the remedies. It is however not a cake walk to get rid of the malware. Below are the guidelines to do the same.
The first thing that you must always do is to take the back up of your critical and important files. Before you start any operations to get rid of malware, make sure you have a copy of your important data. You would not want to lose out on your important data as a result of Malware Removal. You may take a backup on a flash USB drive, Floppy drive (if sufficient), or on a CD drive.
Many people tend to install an anti malware software to clean up an infected computer. This is certainly not the best of options. The malicious software (malware) is smart enough to defend itself. This is not to say that the anti malware software is not a good thing to install. However, it must be installed on a clean computer to protect it from any threats in future. As is famously said, virus programmers generally outsmart the anti virus programmers.
An alternative is to install and run an anti malware software in safe mode. Once in safe mode, the computer would not allow the malware or any other programs to perform any independent operations. This will allow you to use your anti malware program to scan and clean up the computer. The sad part is that sometimes your OS may also be infected with malware. In such cases, the safe mode will not help the cause either.
Now, we discuss the arguably best means of removing malware. Disconnect your infected hard disk from your computer and reconnect it to another computer as data (not primary). The computer you connect to must already have a good anti malware installed. This will allow the anti malware to effectively remove the malware. You may want to repeat the process with many computers installed with different anti malware software. This is a time taking job, but worth the effort.
In case it does not harm you, formatting the hard disk is the finest option. The format option will clean up anything and everything on the hard disk. You can then install a fresh copy of OS on your system.
