I deal a lot with computer repair. I have fount that a lot of viruses and other miscellaneous software can not be removed with antivirus and malware software. What I tend to do with a clients computer is to re-install windows or the OS. There was one time on my personal PC I was able to remove the unwanted process files and remove it from the registry. I think it was the viruses that takes over windows printing process and consumes memory over time. But I have not replicated what did sense then. Also, after re-installing windows I put Microsoft Security Essentials on the computer because it seems to protect the computer and does not impact the performance as much as other programs would.
Basically what are the steps you take when dealing with a issue with miscellaneous or unwanted software that does not want to be removed? And what program do you use to prevent it from happening again?
I'm not wendell, I know, but I was just going to say that if you want to get a reply from someone in the teksyndicate team, then I think it's easier if you ask at inbox.exe instead. If you already know that and maybe tried it but haven't got a reply, then I'm sorry for bothering you.
Comments from the community are always welcome and if anyone can answer from their own experiences that will be greatly appreciated. Do you mean the email they have setup?
I deal with a lot of PCs from clients, and the antivirus I always use is Kaspersky, I find it the less intrusive and so far has not let any of the virus pass through from the infected discs to my PC while I am working on fixing them.
Microsoft's security essentials is really not up to par when dealing with many virus, they can get through easily, even MS is recommending not to depend just on essentials anymore.
There are definitely cases when is just easier to backup the client's files and restore the drive of a PC than trying to fix the many things that a virus have modified.
There are some viruses that lock out antivirus solutions and firewalls. The two ways I've found of handling them are 1.) Running in safe mode and removing every single trace by hand (Startup list, sometimes they hide in your services under msconfig, registry, and all traces on your hard drive. This can be very difficult to do on some viruses that purposely fragment a lot) 2.) Running an AV in linux on that hard drive. This prevents the virus from locking you out and re-fragmenting because it never actually runs.
As far as prevention goes, Avast! is my personal favorite free AV. For paid solutions Kaspersky and ESET NOD32 are my suggestions. Generally the differences between the paid versions and free ones isn't about virus protection but about other things like parental controls and sometimes things like sandboxes and other solutions to run programs in isolation.
I always turn auto play off on a clients/my computer for safe measure. And make sure I don't click on anything that that is not a text file or media file. When I review/recover personal files on a computer that won't boot because of a boot issue with windows.
I use Clonezilla when making a img back up. Just in case something goes wrong and I have to start over. I have yet to try restore on Clonezilla. So I'm still skeptical on how well it works. What do you use to back clients data?
I have seen times when MSE is not the best. But the vary low performance hit compared to others I find vary useful in older or low end computers. I have not used Kaspersky or any other AV programs in a while so I do not know how heavily they run on a computer. Would Kaspersky hit the performance hard on say a first gen I3 or an equivalent consumer grade computer?
Linux with Clam AV is what I use, I have something called Trinity, its free software, it has a load of tools, from password breaking to virus removing to hard drive cloning, Also look into something called MiniXP, its XP but live, works brilliantly for using AV tools like Malwarebytes for a final sweep.
i like to find the virus, kill it manually, and send funny ass data to the author. I had this one virus on xp that in its config file had an email that data was sent to. i signed him up for multiple porn websites and sent him some funny ass emails. The person even e-mailed me back and called me a faggot.