virus

I have two questions i really need help with.I have Avast 4 home for my virus protection and it says that I have three options when a virus is found, delete it-repair it-or send to virus chest,…so how do i learn when to use which one!!! Secondly,how or where can i learn whats a virus or not. For instance, the other day i did a boot scan and it found a virus and it said WIN 32 and something else after that,i sent to virus chest and then deleted.

Hi jhatch,

The best policy is to send it to the virus chest, there it cannot harm anymore.
Later you can see what to do with it,

polonus

I suggest, in this sequence: repair, then send to Chest and if it fails, schedule a boot time scanning and do the same, repair or send to Chest.

Deleting at the first time, for non-advanced users, could have side-effects (deleting necessary files for the computer to boot or operate). Anyway, the majority of the infections could be deleted.

There is little point in sending it to the chest if you are then going to delete it as the others have said, ‘first do no harm’ don’t delete, send virus to the chest and investigate.

There is no rush to delete anything from the chest, a protected area where it can do no harm. Anything that you send to the chest you should leave there for a week or two. If after that time you have suffered no adverse effects from moving these to the chest, scan them again (inside the chest) and if they are still detected as viruses, delete them.

Repair only works for certain files, Trojans generally can’t be repaired (either by the VRDB or avast virus cleaner), because the entire content of the file is malware, so it is either move to chest or delete, move to the chest being the best option (first do no harm). When a file is in the chest it can’t do any harm and you can investigate the infected warning.

The VRDB only protects certain files, .exe, dll and other system files, it doesn’t protect data files or all files, it is not a back-up program, so there are going to be many occasions where repair won’t be an option.

Only true virus infection can be repaired, e.g. when a virus infects a file it adds a small part to it, provided that file is one that avast’s VRDB would monitor and you have run the VRDB, then it may be possible to repair the file to its uninfected state.

However, for the most part so called viruses, trojans (adware/spyware/malware, etc.) can’t be repaired because the complete content of the file is malicious.

It is also important to give the virus name, the infected file name and its original location, this helps us to give you specific information rather than general advice.