The virus thing...
Well... I'll illustrate the issue with an anecdote...
I took a family friend on as an emergency client. They home school, and the system they use for homeschooling was well hosed up, to the point where it was completely unusable. It would boot, but applications and web pages wouldn't load, it would reboot randomly etc...
I looked at it... No exaggeration, there were over 6,000 individual pieces of malware, spyware, adware... and that's with 4 different AV/adware/spyware/anti-malware packages running, including the commercial and updated norton 360. They also had 4 different "system optimizer" or "system cleaner" packages running, and god knows how much other "helpful" garbage.
He asked what I charged and I said "I'm doing this as a family friend, because to clean this up... Labor alone would be more than you make in two weeks. It's going to take me at least two full days. It'd be faster to wipe it and start over but you don't have backups or install disks for a bunch of this stuff. Even then, I really recommend wiping it when you get the chance, because I might have missed something.
And yes, it did take two full days... actually more than. I actually put over 20 hours into cleaning the system up, then rebuilding it to a consistent and usable state, then locking it down and putting tools in place to... I wish I could say prevent, but it's a windows machine so I can only say reduce the likelihood... of that sort of thing ever happening again.
Just so he would understand and appreciate the amount of work involved, and what that kind of work costs, I printed him up an invoice, with a 100% discount. Yes, it was more than he made in two weeks. He just about crapped his pants.
So, my advice on the virus thing is this... Wipe the machine completely, and install from scratch. If you can't do that yourself, donate the machine or give it to a smart kid who can, and buy a new one. It'll be cheaper and easier for you.
Oh and NEVER EVER EVER EVER buy or install norton, or mcaffee, or frankly any of the major vendors anti-virus, "security suite" or software "firewall" packages, and never buy or install a "system cleaner" (except piriforms ccleaner aka crap cleaner, which I install on every windows machine automatically). If they come on your computer from the factory, clean them off completely before you try to run anything. They are actively harmful.
For anti-malware, use windows security essentials, and comodo, AVG, or malwarebytes as a secondary scanner, and run Winpatrol to keep control of your computers settings and startup programs etc...
In general, don't be an idiot. Don't download anything, or open attachments or web pages, you don't know, or are not well known and trusted sources etc... etc... Virus scan everything before you open it, and turn on live virus scanning in your security software.
Oh and NEVER load or use a browser toolbar of any kind, unless you are absolutely sure you want to use it, exactly what it does and who it came from.
Most importantly, always live behind a physical firewall. Never expose a windows machine to the bare internet, no matter what kind of software "firewalll" you have running (software firewalls don't protect you worth a damn. Also they shouldn't be called firewalls, because they aren't). You WILL be compromised, within minutes, without question.
As someone that has done consumer PC support for more than 15 years, I concur 100%.
I would add that for anti-malware I like HijackThis... For AV, I like Avast over AVG as I have had way too many false positives with AVG.
Also for system cleanup, I like CCleaner a LOT, but you have to be careful with it, there is a drive wiper option that will irreversibly erase a hard drive and I have had people do it.
Way back in the Windows 98 days, I spent a good bit of time doing phone support for Gateway on their incoming 1-900 line. People would pay me $2 a minute to fix their virus problems. Generally any attempt to clean a virus took more than 2 hours of time and that was with a step by step removal process that was written down in great detail. And this was in the days before everyone had always on internet and viruses started seeking out other viruses to download. Back then the process usually went something like this:
1. Boot to safe mode
2. Clear startup
3. Delete registry keys
4. Delete specific files
5. Uninstall suspicious programs
6. Reboot and check for the virus
Generally speaking our first step was to try to convince the person to let us start a re-format process. If we could do that, we would get it started and then get off the phone, this would take about 20 minutes, versus the many hours to clean it.
Fast forward 15 years and I can guarantee you 100% that if you find one virus on a machine, there will be at least a dozen. And cleaning them will be FAR more involved than what I just described. In short it is almost always easier and faster to wipe the drive.
