How to Know And Clean If Your Computer Is Infected

These days malicious software is becoming an epidemic. It seems like it’s everywhere. Also, sadly, there's been a change in the way malware acts. It used to be that it would slow down your computer, or display annoying popups, but now malware is becoming increasingly discreet. You could be infected right now and not even know it. Also, sadly, it often seems as if the only way to make sure you’re not infected is to scan your computer with numerous anti-malware programs. Doing this can be time consuming and, while scanning, may even slow your computer to a crawl. Even after that you still can’t be sure you're clean. This is because scanners cannot recognize all new malware.

Because of these difficulties I have come up with a better method. This uses multiple programs, not to remove files, but just to analyze the computer. Each of these programs is very effective and easy to use. They are all portable applications and will not cause any conflicts on your computer because they are only running when you're using them. However, they do require an active internet connection to function properly. Don't worry, this guide will also help you to fix your internet connection in the event that it is not working. After you have already gone through the below process once, and had all files whitelisted, this approach is much faster, much more certain, and much easier than any other approach I've seen. No active malware can escape this process. However, inactive pieces of malware may not be flagged by this approach but may be found by other scanners. Rest assured that these are not direct threats to the safety of your computer and thus do not constitute a failure of this article.

This article is meant for those who believe it's possible, but are not sure, that malware is running on their computer. If you strongly believe that malware is running on your computer I would advise that you immediately reboot the computer into Safe Mode and follow the advice in this section of my article about How to Clean An Infected Computer. The reason I say that is that some malware will immediately start doing things such as encrypting files. Thus, the longer your computer is running in normal mode the greater the damage will be. However, if you only have fleeting suspicious that something may be amiss on your computer I recommend that you follow the below advice to find out for sure.

I also want to stress that in order to make sure that your computer is not infected you must follow each step. None is meant to be used independently. Each depends on the others to account for different infection scenarios. Also, if any step shows definite evidence of an infection you should move directly to the section which explains How To Clean Infections From Computer. There is no reason to continue your investigation if your computer is already found to be infected.

How to Clean An Infected Computer

The truth is that it's a lot easier to keep a computer malware free than it is to clean one that is already infected. However, with the advice given in this article you should be able to remove any type of malware from your computer and get it back to working order. The main problem with most malware removal guides is that you have no way of knowing if all of the infections were removed. However, with my approach you can easily tell if even just running a single scanner was able to entirely clean the infection. Thus, this can save you the hassle of having to run many different scanners and the uncertainty of whether your computer is really malware free.

Make sure you follow this article in order so as to clean the infections with as little work as possible. The idea is that most people won't have to go any further than the first approach in order to clean their computers of active malware. Thus, effectively this article is actually much shorter than it appears to be.

However, before attempting to remove any infected files you should first back up all important non-executable files. This way if anything goes wrong with the cleaning process, which is a very real possibility, your important documents will still be intact. Please note that if your computer cannot boot you should follow the advice on this page in order to back up all important files. Also, while cleaning the computer it's important to remember that all scanners can sometimes be guilty of false positive detections. Therefore, before removing any files which you believe could possibly be safe.