How do you know.....

Viruses and worms
1

Hi,

When someones computer got hit by virus,trojan, worms or anything else.

After fixing those pesky stuffs. How do you know that your computer is working fine as it was before.

Meaning to say, that there is no missing file or command,or altered settings , missing registry etc etc.

Hope you understand what I mean.

Having said that, how to ensure your comp is back in order as it was…well almost perfectly in order.

Thanks a bunch ;D

2

Hi Steve1368,

A good anti-virus program should return your computer to good working order after removing a virus. You know the virus has gone when the computer is working normally. The most important thing to look for is no strange running processes or internet activity. There might be a few stray registry keys left behind, and a clean-up with a good registry cleaner usually removes a lot of junk, but with malware files deleted, these are usually harmless. A scan with HijackThis! also usually reveals entries left by the virus which can be cleaned up- references to ‘missing’ files which the anti-virus program has deleted. Of course, if the virus has damaged a system file or made changes to the registry which your anti-virus program could not clean up, your computer may be left inoperable. Which is why it’s always a good idea to backup files before you start to clean a virus.

3

Sorry to ask this question, when you say " a good idea to backup files" how do you actually go about doing it, I mean the steps to back up & what do you actually back up.

Thanks a lot.

4

Hi Steve1368,

No need to apologise for asking a question!

Backup simply means making a copy. There are various ways to do this. The simplest is to burn them to CD. Copy documents, pictures, MP3’s to CD so you don’t lose them if you can’t access the hard disk anymore.

Other things to backup are emails and email contacts, internet favourites, saved games, program settings…

There are also backup utilities which will automatically copy files to another location at a scheduled time. They will also compress files to save space. On machines with a second hard disk, these programs can automatically copy new or modified files to the second disk where they are safe if the main hard disk fails or becomes unusable. This works in the background, so it’s obviously a lot easier.

Another method is to create a copy of the whole hard disk. As today’s hard disks are huge, this requires either a second hard disk or a number of DVD-R’s. (Plus a ‘disk imaging’ program to make the copy.)

For me, the first method is fine. If you want to try a backup utility, I recommend SyncBack:

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/SyncBack.html

I must admit, using the program seems more complicated than just burning files to CD, but if anybody with a second hard disk, it would probably be worth the effort to schedule automatic backups of important documents and folders to that disk.

5

Thank you, I will explore further on this.