How To Remove A Virus From Your Computer

Is your computer performance is very slower than usual and you are experiencing a lot of unusual things happening in your PC like a lot of pop-ups and unwanted pages or messages getting displayed, then it is true that your computer is infected with a virus and you need to remove that as quick as possible before it spreads to other files or registries of the windows.

Before getting into the steps involved in removing a virus from a computer lets discuss about how the computer is getting infected. If your windows firewall is not updated regularly or if you don’t have a real time Security software or antivirus installed in your PC then the chances of your computer getting affected is very high. So please make sure that you get a fully featured antivirus software installed in your machine as early as possible in order to avoid the risk of any future attacks.

1. Removing the virus

You can remove the virus from your computer in 4 different ways.

2. Connect to the internet

If you are able to connect to the internet in your computer, then open the web browser and run a online scan for your PC. There are many online scanners available in the internet which you can make use. Some of them are Microsoft Safety Scanner

3. Can’t connect to the internet

In case if you are not able to connect to the internet, then restart the computer in Safe mode with networking enabled. For logging on to your computer in safe mode, restart your computer and once something appears on the screen like the manufacturers logo or anything else then press the F8 key repeatedly. Now choose the Safe mode with networking enabled.

The reason why you need to log on using safe mode is the virus or the malware that affects your PC may not get loaded in safe mode. And only those files and registers which are essential for the functioning of the machine gets loaded. Now connect to the internet and open any online scanner and scan your PC.

4. Run on-demand scanner

If you are not able to connect to the internet even after logging in safe mode, then you can scan your computer using an on-demand scanner. We need to manually run the on-demand scanner in order to identify the virus. There are many on-demand scanners available in the internet, some of them are Malwarebytes, Bitdefender free edition, Kaspersky virus removal tool. The on-demand scanner that you are choosing must be different from the antivirus software that is currently installed on your PC, because the infected virus may not be detected by your real time antivirus software. Note that none of the antivirus software can function 100% efficiently in detecting any type of malware.

Since you are not connected to the internet, you can download the on-demand scanner from another computer and copy it to a USB flash drive and then use it in the infected computer and install the scanner. Once the installation is complete, perform a quick scan of your PC. Normally the scan takes around 30 minutes to complete. Once the scan completes, press the result button to see the virus that has infected your computer, now remove the virus from your computer by pressing the Remove button.

5. Remove the virus manually

The last method to remove a virus is manually browse through the windows registry and delete it. But for this you must know the name of the virus which you can get by running a scan using your antivirus program. And again this one is a more technical process and you need to have some experience in windows before performing this method.

Now that the virus is removed from your computer, you might now run a full scan of your PC using your real time antivirus program. If you don’t have an antivirus software installed then it is highly recommended that you get one. After running the scan, it is advisable to delete all your browsing history and saved passwords and create new ones. It is also good if you take backup of your PC more frequently so that you may avoid losing important data.

Please do let us know if you have any other special or easy method to remove a virus from the computer so that we can update this post with those techniques which will be helpful for many more people.