Information Madness

Scrub your personal computer and clean it off malware. Malware is filth. It craps up your system with files that are unwanted and makes itself known occasionally in the form of a pop-up window or an irritating browser-based toolbar. In worst cases, malware completely takes over your desktop or laptop and makes your life miserable.

Your system slows down to a crawl. Your booting is also painfully slow. It can even lock down your browser making you unable to actually do any browsing without being taken to some bogus domain. You are attacked by fake advertisements.

These are the steps to knock this malware off:

1. YOU are the first line of defence. Don’t run any unknown program. Don’t install anything that is unknown or strange or too lengthy. Don’t browse the internet blindly with a presumption that everything on a website is safe for you.

2. Vulnerability in browsers and plug-ins can really bring your system down. Stop using an outdated browser. Use Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome. Chrome is the best of all these as it is a healthy survivor against all kinds of hackers.

3. Install Windows Security Essentials and you will have instant access to frequent Microsoft virus, spyware and malware updates. Norton Antivirus or McAfee also help but tend to slow your system down a bit.

4. Disaster recovery when infected is tricky – Malwarebytes’ Anti-malware will run a full scan on your system when your definitions are updated. You can use the Utility RKill facility as it will try and stop any malware processes that may be running in your system’s background.

If nothing works, then you know it is time to get the malware fumigated by a reformat.