Getting a computer viruses or some nasty on your system can be a pain in the backside. Here are some top tips to beat it and get back on track.

The first step is to arm yourself with a toolkit of anti-virus / malware removal programs. Many malicious programs have the ability to block access to download sites of popular virus removal tools or worse still divert the user to an entirely different web page, who knows what unsuspecting victims will be installing next, so having copies of these programs to hand can decide your fate!

A none rewritable media such as a CD would be safest bet to store your toolkit to prevent the risk of further spreading an infection. The downside of this is your virus definitions for removing infections are more likely to be out dated, possibly rendering them useless. Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware applications are reactive in creation not proactive – it would be virtually impossible to cure an infection which hasn’t existed yet. So do your best to keep up-to-date.

It could be considered wise to disable any access to other network resource, hopefully killing the connection before the infection has had chance to replcate itself to other devices, the easiest and quickest way to acheive this would be to remove the network cable.

Some decent free tools to help get you started are Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, SUPERAntiSpyware, Spybot Search & Destroy, Ad-Aware, Microsoft Security Essentials, Combofix and possibly even CCleaner. There are many more available too, but be careful what you download and where you download them from. Try and stick to trusted familiar brands and original official vendor webpages for downloads as there are plenty of malicious programs out there posing as the real deal when infact they are themselves malware.

Generally it is recommended that you should only really install one real-time protection anti-virus program at a time, to help limit over-straining your system resources and avoid conflicts between scanners. However it’s usually safe to install as many on-demand scanners as you like. I tend to stick with one real-time protection anti-virus program and one on-demand anti-malware scanner. Although some may prefer several on-demand anti-malware scanners to tackle malicious software on numerous fronts, after all there’s always a chance one scanner has a virus definition for something another may not. It’s a case of how paranoid you are and how much time you have to spare!

Some other useful tools which may aid but not really designed as first line anti-virus defence include Sysinternals Process Explorer and Autoruns for Windows these can be used to monitor what processes are running and being started on your machine and with a little patience and knowledge help you track down the location of the infection. Often helpful in removing an infection manually.

explorer.exe

If you’re having trouble running or installing your virus removal programs you can simply try and outsmart the malicious software by renaming your executable explorer.exe and then running it again.

Explorer.exe is part of the Microsoft Windows Operating System. The explorer.exe file is a Windows GUI shell. Its graphical user interface lets you see your hard drives, folders, and files. At first explorer.exe was used only to browse files, but with the release of newer Windows versions it evolved to being a task-based file management system. Although not vital this process is pretty important to the system, so is usually over looked by viruses, hence why this neat little trick often does the charm.

HOSTS

If you are having trouble accessing or downloading things from the web, check that your hosts files has not been maliciously altered. This is a quick and dirty trick malicious programs often do to redirect you to their own servers, often with popular domains such as Google – so that you are actually really searching on the exploiters version of Google despite appearances.

The hosts file is a computer file used by Windows to map hostnames to IP addresses. The hosts file can be found in your Windows directory:

C:WindowsSystem32driversetchosts

You can open this file in notepad. Unless you have altered this file, by default apart from some commented lines represented by a hash symbol #, you should only have one entry or two entries for IP6 enabled computers.

127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost

These are your loopback addresses to your own machine.

Safe-Mode

If your Anti-Virus program seems to finds entries but does not appear capable to remove them you can try booting up into Safe-mode and running the scan again.

Windows Safe Mode bypasses start-up programs and drivers that are not required for Windows to load and will allow you to fix Windows problems.

To get into Safe-mode, as the computer is booting press and hold your “F8 Key” which should bring up the “Windows Advanced Options Menu”. Use your arrow keys to move to “Safe Mode” and press your Enter key.

Login as a Different User

You may notice the infection your computer has picked up only appear to affect a particular user. This is because many malicious programs live in the users profile in locations such as Application Data or Temporary Internet Files.

A very easy trick is to run your scans as a different user, you are then able to safely scan a system without the hassle of malicious scripts blocking your virus removal tools.

Remove temporary files

Related to the subject above of many malicious programs living in the users profile, a simple clean-up of temporary files maybe enough in some cases to remove that nasty program.

You can do this manually or with the aid of programs such as CCleaner.

Reformat

If all else fails or you just want to bypass all the hurdles, the only way to truly guarantee that you are virus free is to flatten and reformat your system with a fresh copy of windows.

After all just because you don’t have applications opening themselves all over the place doesn’t necessarily mean that your system is clean. When it comes down to it what’s really worse some bloated in-your-face program asking innocent onlookers for credit card details or the cleverly devised invisible packet sniffing exploit which sits patiently in the background waiting for bystanders to do some online banking before so that it may r report back to Major Tom with your credentials.