Computer Repair

Virus Removal

It is not always easy to determine if you have a virus.

In past times, before the advent of the internet, viruses spread through floppy disks, and CDs etc. Their ability to remain undiscovered until it's too late determined the success of that virus. Minimum exposure meant it could spread further without getting discovered, and only then through the damage it caused.

Once the internet, email and instant messaging came along, the priorities of the virus writers changed. Now rather than subtly spread from victim to victim, the idea is for maximum effect of the 'payload' as it were. By the time the virus has finished running, the computer owner knew they had been infected with something, as well as everyone else on their network, or in their address book etc.

The more subtle viruses offer some characteristics to watch out for, these are :

1 Computer becomes unresponsive preventing you from doing anything. Processor is at 100% trying to spread the virus (Task Manager).

2 Hard disk becoming very busy when you're not doing anything… continually and for no apparent reason. However please be aware that some applications operate in the background sometimes causing erratic disk access.

3 The computer tries to dial up to the internet… continually and for no apparent reason. This is not noticeable if the computer is on a network, generally network traffic shoots up and is noticed on the PC which accesses the internet.

4 Unexpected things happen when you are using the computer. Crashing applications, strange files appearing, disk space reducing very fast etc.

5 You are getting strange messages appearing, messages you would not expect. For example an error reporting a sound card driver error, when you know you have a completely different card in your PC. Or an error with an application which has run fine till then.