Computer Viruses

Computer viruses work by modifying existing programs rather than installing additional programs on the system. A computer virus is often a fragment of a complete program rather than a complete program by itself. It works by inserting copies of itself into existing programs, modifying them to do things they were not originally designed to do. Computer viruses often don't easily reveal their presence until they leap into action, causing major damage to your computer setup. A virus may become active immediately or may lie dormant for an extended time, depending on its design.

Viruses are written for a multitude of purposes. Some are malicious, intended to delete files or otherwise cause damage to the infected computer system. Some may be designed to request certain pages from a particular website. Possibly you may have heard of the term Distributed Denial of Service attack. This is how it is done. By infecting a large number of PCs and having them each start sending requests to a particular site at a specific time, they hope to block legitimate accesses to the site by overloading it with fake requests.

Yet other viruses may be created for the purpose of creating a "back door" into your computer, so the virus author can take control of the computer remotely, run programs on it, examine or download files, etc. This type of program is sometimes called a backdoor or a Trojan.

Fortunately, the technology to detect and remove viruses is highly advanced and there are many excellent programs that do it well. If you are doing all of the steps of diagnosing and fixing your PC as presented on the home page, you might notice we deal with viruses in two different places. Right now we will perform a diagnostic scan of your system for active and dormant viruses and remove whatever is found. At a later step we will install a good antivirus program to keep viruses from ever getting into the system. The antivirus program will also sweep the system for any viruses as part of the installation process. By doing the virus scan now as well as later the installation process will go much smoother and the chance of a significant virus getting missed is much reduced.

Many people do not know that several major companies that sell antivirus software also offer free virus scanners. These can be run directly from a browser. That's how we will diagnose your system for viruses now. But before getting into the scan let's go over a few points.

1. The virus scanner usually requires MS Internet Explorer - it may not run from other browsers. If you are using something else, return to this page in Internet Explorer and then continue.
2. The scanners usually have a check-box to control whether to automatically fix everything it finds or not. I usually prefer to see a list of the things it detects first, before it starts making changes to my system. Select this setting according to your preference.
3. Virus removal can be very difficult and even the best programs will sometimes have difficulty with certain ones. In case your system has a virus that cannot be successfully removed by one of the scanners here, try running the other one.

We present a choice of two virus scanners for you to use, both are excellent and both are free. The first one is the Eset NOD32 virus scanner. NOD32 has excellent reviews and tends to be the highest in customer satisfaction surveys of all antivirus software. It is also the fastest.

The other virus scanner we link to here is from Panda Software. The latest version of Panda Antivirus has received very high scores in benchmark tests for thoroughness.