Does your computer affect by Malware? Want to Clean Malware infected computer? So you noticed that your PC behaves somewhat strangely recently, what is it? Do you think it slows down unreasonably? Perhaps random applications do pop up in the foreground without you touching anything? Your files disappeared or got renamed and inaccessible for no reason?
Whatever your problem might be, you’re suspecting that your PC has been infected by some type of Malware and you want to remove it, so let’s go straight to this article and see how you can remove a virus from your PC.
How to find if your system have a virus?
The first thing that you want to do before removing a virus, is to check if you have one in the first place. Just because your PC behaves a little bit differently doesn’t mean that you’re infected by a virus, you could simply have installed a lot of legitimate applications that slow down your PC, or you could have installed an application that is made to pop up at random times on your foreground, or anything among these lines.
The easiest way to find out if you’ve been infected by a virus is by installing an Antivirus like AVG (20% Discounted Link) and an Anti-Malware like Malwarefox. Using only an Antivirus for protection or only an Anti-Malware is a no go, they’re made differently. An Antivirus will only find and remove older kinds of viruses and an Anti-Malware only the newer ones. So you’ll need both of them for this.
If for any reason your PC doesn’t allow you to install security apps, then that is a good sign that you’re already infected by a virus, the hacker thought ahead of you and created the virus in a way that would not allow you to install an Antivirus and remove it. If you can not install any security applications reboot into safe mode with networking and see if you can do anything from there.
Now you might be thinking about installing two security programs at once because a lot of people do say that we shouldn’t install more than two at the same time as they will interfere with each other and they will slow down your computer. That is partly true if you install two Antivirus programs or two Anti-Malware programs they might interfere with each other, but that doesn’t happen if you one Antivirus and one Anti-Malware.
That is because as I said before, they’re kind of made in a different way. After you have installed both of them (I do recommend them from personal experience) perform a full scan, make sure that only one of them is scanning at the time, if both of them are scanning at the same time interferences might arise, when they just work with real-time protection there is no problem, but there could be when they’re both scanning at the same time.
If there are viruses installed on your PC, at least one of the security programs that you installed must have detected it. Do keep in mind that the Anti-Malware might report some applications as PUP but we’ll get there in a minute.
If no viruses at all were found but you still think that something is wrong, open your task manager and see if any applications use a ridiculous amount of your CPU, if you find any, check in depth what applications they are and what they do, they might be one of your applications, don’t just jump the gun and remove them.
For example, there was a time when a process which I had no idea from which application it was coming, was eating all of my CPU resources and RAM at the same time, I thought it might be a virus, at the time I didn’t have any important files that I wanted to keep or anything, so I went ahead and reinstalled the whole OS.
To my surprise even after the complete format of my PC, the same process was eating all of my CPU and RAM again, after digging around it a bit, I found out that it was Windows update that caused the problem, some bug caused it to use all of the resources that were available on the PC at all times. After looking for the necessary updates on Google and installing them, the problem was gone.
So just because you found something that drains all of your PC resources, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a virus. Research a little before making any decisions.
How to Clean Malware infected computer?
Alright so you installed the necessary software, followed my steps and now you have the result in front of your eyes. After you or the Antivirus-Malware has identified an application as a virus, all you have to do to remove it is to do so from the security applications, they should give you the option to remove any threats unless you installed an application that requires you to pay in order to remove the threats.
Regarding PUPs, PUP goes for potentially unwanted program, which means exactly what it says, a potentially unwanted program which isn’t necessarily harmful but you might want to consider removing it, a great example of a PUP is adware software, applications that get installed without your permission or knowledge and often pop up at the foreground of your screen at random times for no reason.
Again if for any reason you select to remove the threats but for any reason, you can’t do so, reboot into safe mode and try from there, in safe mode only the absolute necessary applications start-up, in that way if a virus is preventing you from installing an Anti-Malware, an Antivirus, or it won’t let you remove it with them, it should work if you try to do so while you’re in safe mode.
How to fix everything that got broken
In some cases even if you remove the virus itself, the damage that it caused will stay behind. So for some viruses simply removing them isn’t just enough. The first example that comes to my mind is ransomware viruses, they encrypt your files and after you remove them your files will still stay encrypted.
So let’s suppose that you’ve got infected with a ransomware virus for now. You found and removed the virus with your Anti-Malware but your files are still encrypted and you need them back. The first thing is to check for backups and Windows restore points and restore them, if everything was deleted, look into Google for data restore applications.
So you see that in some cases even when a virus is removed, the problems that it caused remain behind. Regardless of the virus that you got infected with, the process to remove it and the damage that it caused, is pretty much the same. If a virus requires special treatment to be removed, Google the very exact name of it and how to remove it, your security programs should at the very least identify its type.
I know that this is a Malware removal guide but if I were to explain the process of how to remove every single type of virus, you would be reading for hours and hours. This is just an easy and generalized guide on how to remove Malware from Windows systems, detailed in-depth ones can be found for each individual type of virus with huge articles.
Protect your PC
I guess you can already tell that it’s much easier to prevent a virus from infecting you, rather than waiting to get infected first and then removing the virus. Removing viruses and their aftereffects can be a huge pain depending on the type of virus. So the best way to go is to stay safe and avoid as much as possible falling into them and prevent our Computers from getting infected in the first place.
To do so, make sure that both your Antivirus and Anti-Malware have real-time protection, both of those that I recommended should have this. Make sure that you perform regular scans for viruses or schedule a daily/weekly scan and make sure that you’re not already infected by anything at that given moment.
After you have completed the above steps just be careful on what links you click on, what websites you visit and in general, keep your eyes open for anything that might look suspicious in order to avoid it, especially spam emails, no matter how tempting they might be spam emails do often have viruses attached with them or phishing websites, stay clean, stay safe.
- You May Also Like: 8 Ways That you can prevent hacking of your computer, Mac or Online Activity
If you like this tutorial about How to Clean Malware infected computer, please share it with your friends. Want more tech. tips, Please follow whatvwant on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to whatVwant channel on YouTube for regular updates.