Non-techie advice

[Badger]

Not the best when it comes to techie stuff but i know a man who does...

Anyway, been infected by all sorts of c*ap recently on my h/d and my man has installed some cool tools (for free) that really help.

So apologies to all those in the know, but for everyone else, get these free software downloads to protect your machine.

anti virus software - http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.php
adware - http://www.lavasoft.com/
spybot - http://www.download.com/3120-20_4-0.html?qt=spybot&tg=dl-2001

All three work perfectly in harmony.

Just have to remove 'norton' once youve loaded the avg stuff from grisoft..

Trust me, my computers now as watertight as a mermaids brassier..

 

[{insert name here}]

Those programs are good, I'll give you that. But one thing I have noticed about them, is that they really dont take care of the problem. They will find a "adware" or "spyware" file, and tell you they delete them, but if you run it again two hours later, it finds it again. Not sure why that happens, but I think is because they dont imunize your pc. I would recomend Microsofts new one, located here : Giant

Works really good, does the job of all of those at once, and imunizes your pc, so if it finds it once, you will never get it again. It also cleans your reg keys, very handy!

 

[MissFlora]

Hm..Not to say I'm a virus expert or something but I worked with viruses for a number of years and personally do not find lavasoft as efficient as it is supposed to be. One reason is that when it comes across adwares that infect your registry, it does not do the cleaning thoroughly. So you gotta do it manually which is a pain in the ars*. As for AV software, I am not 100% sure about grisoft but I have always used Trend Housecall which works like magic for me and my infectees. Overall, IMO Norton is one of the worst AV I've ever encountered so far with lots of its bogus "joke virus" alerts. Try using PestPatrol (which detects Spywares + Adwares) & Trend Housecall AV. These are my suggestions to you.

Regards,
Flora.

 

[redhippo]

thanks guys for these security links! well done!

 

[identity_00]

Yup some viruses will use other files to stay alive. So you can delete the obvious virus file but when you restart it will come back.

I have found that(after you clean up) if you just keep up with the updates and be careful what you download then you really dont get anything. I use the net all day also -

 

[Redleg]

Hijackthis takes care of most registry related stuff.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download3155.html

But be carefull what you delete with it, it reports a lot of stuff that's supposed to be there.

If you're not an experienced user then you can use this one to analyze your hijackthis logfile
http://www.hijackthis.de/index.php