Friday, May 29, 2009

A Little PC Cleanup Today

This morning I was asked to do a favor for one of our electrical contractors, who'd brought his home PC in with the hopes of getting it cleaned up.  Specifically, it was infected with the "Personal Antivirus" malware program, which looks quite a bit like AVG Antivirus, which is of course a legit program.

Hitting Google for removal instructions, the first link I clicked on recommended using Malware Bytes to get rid of Personal Antivirus.  I've recently been evaluating Malware Bytes, so I figured this would be a good test on a system known to be infected.  It worked, and picked up a few other items as well.  Good deal.

After getting that squared away I also installed Spybot Search & Destroy for realtime protection, the HOSTS file from MVPS.org, and CCleaner.

The system was already setup to receive Windows updates automatically, so the final piece of software I loaded was Firefox with the Adblock Plus extension.  I imported all the bookmarks and settings from IE but left the latter as the default browser.

Before returning the PC to my boss I taped a note to the side with a description of what I'd done and with some recommendations, including replacing Norton 360 with AVG, and using Firefox instead of IE.

2 comments:

MaddMedic said...

I use AVG and have for years, Spybot and CCleaner also. I had not heard of Malware Bytes may have to check that out and I use Firefox with AdBlock.
I have yet to have a virus on any of our own computers at home 3 home builds, 3 notebooks all networked. Spyware and Malware are nasty and I have to constantly check my son's computers, but since they have gotten older they do not go to nickelodeon's site, Cartoon Network and a couple of others they use to frequent and hmmmm not so many problems with spyware!!!

Lee said...

I use Avira and Comodo Firewall. So far, both are working best for my computer. :)
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