Dealing with Malware

[Raz_Fox]

Being the ditz that I am, I forgot to put virus protection on my netbook. Given the title of this thread, you can probably guess how well that turned out. So now a program titled Win Scanning (a.k.a. Win Defrag) that has put its hooks in my machine. It's trying to tell me that my hard drive is dead and needs to be repaired, which is obviously not the case, as well as hiding my start bar and icons in an attempt to convince me that this is the case. Also, if I close enough of its pop-ups, it reboots the machine.

So, um... any tips on how to remove it, given its tenacity and refusal to be uninstalled?

[The Glyphstone]

A quick-semi-fix I've found to work sometimes is a system restore. Get your computer running in Safe Mode, then do a System Restore as far back as you can confirm the virus wasn't attacking your system. This can get rid of it, though to be certain you want some scrubber software like Malwarebytes, Adaware, or CCCleaner.

[The Succubus]

Mmmm, a number of friends have recommended Malware Bytes to me recently. As our popcorn purveying postwatcher posited previously, either launching in Safe Mode or booting from the Windows backup CD and doing a full system spring clean will probably sort your woes out. =3

[Raz_Fox]

I ended up using Ad-Aware to get rid of it, so thank you, Glyphstone. Crisis over!

[IonDragon]

...from the Windows backup CD...

*Pst* Netbooks don't have an optical drive.