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What to do if my computer is infected by a virus or a malware?

Our laptop was working great but my hubby took a call from someone claiming to be from MSN and saying they were receiving error reports saying we had viruses. They told him to type some programs into the computer and voila we now HAVE 3 viruses that we didn’t have before! We have 101010 Virus, Stuxnet Virus and Fakealert Virus. We have Microsoft Security Essentials running but can’t run a full scan as the laptop keeps shutting down after about 5minutes. Does anyone know what these viruses are and how we proceed given that pc keeps automatically shutting down?

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Take away hubby's access to the computer. Seriously. As to your more immediate problem, reformat and reinstall is often the easiest pathway. In any case, this isn't a programming question :-) – paxdiablo Sep 27 '11 at 8:18
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Please follow the steps there, but do yourself a favor and just format and reinstall. – slhck Sep 27 '11 at 8:52
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Sep 27 '11 at 8:18

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closed as exact duplicate by slhck, Sathya♦ Sep 27 '11 at 12:36

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1 Answer

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Here's what I would do.

  1. Don't use the laptop for any normal activity. If you have ever used it for banking, contact your bank, explain what has happened and get their advice about securing your bank accounts. At the very least you should change any passwords.

  2. If you have any valuable documents, photos etc on the laptop. Really you should have a separate backup (e.g. on DVD-ROMs or on an external USB disk). If you don't, use a different computer to create a bootable rescue disk (example) and use that to "boot" the infected laptop and make an external copy of your valuable data. Before proceeding, check the copy contains everything you need.

  3. Supplied with the laptop you should have a system-recovery CD or DVD. If you do, use that to reformat the computer and restore it to the way it was when it was new. All your data will be lost. If you don't have a recovery disk of some sort, check the manual to see if the computer has a recovery partition in it's hard disk - you may have to press some special keys whilst turning on the laptop. If none of these apply, contact the seller or manufacturer - they may be able to sell you a recovery disk. If all else fails, I would buy and install a retail version of Windows (check your laptop can run the currently available version).

  4. Restore your valuable data from your daily backup or from the backup you made in step 2.

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in addition, i'd suggest creating seperate per user, non admin accounts and using those – Journeyman Geek Sep 27 '11 at 9:05
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