How Do Technicians Get Rid of a Computer Virus?

A computer virus can severely damage your computer and cause it to crash and become unable to use. When a problem is too complicated or too severe for you to handle you most likely consider taking your system to a computer specialist. They will charge you a fee to look over your computer, determine the virus threat and remove it if at all possible. This article will show you what the technician does in order to find a virus and to eliminate it.

Locating the Virus

These viruses can be found in a number of areas on your computer and it is the job of the technician to find them and then determine how to remove them. The first step a technician takes is to run a virus scanner. They will either run this scan while your computer is in safe mode but many will run a scanner during the booting procedure of the computer. They will use a scanner like McAfee or Norton. There are many free virus scanners that you can download but they do not update their virus removal databases regularly and often do not look in all of the right areas of the computer system. Running a scan during the boot process will show the technician if a virus is located in the memory and other sensitive areas of the computer's architecture. Most software cannot look in these areas while the computer has completed its start up routine.

Virus Sterilization

Depending on the type of virus found on the system the technician will be able to delete it from your hard drive. Essentially, this is a virus that was downloaded and exists as a program of some sort. Many will call these "malware" and they generally cause tracking cookies to be added to your computer or have pop-ups appeared while you are on the Internet. In some cases, the technician will have to remove the virus from several different areas including your mail program directory.

Quarantine

Some viruses are pretty well embedded in your system's architecture and deleting them would damage the computer. This usually happens when a virus attaches itself to another program. Instead of deleting the virus it can be moved or quarantined. It still remains on your computer but is placed in a section that is not accessed by any running applications or processes.

Restoration

Computers always come with several discs which are your restore set. The disc is placed in the CD-Rom drive and the computer is restarted. It reads the disc and will restore the computer to the way it was when you first started it. If this is the route your technician has to take, make sure they can determine which programs will be lost and if they can save them. Make sure you have the discs just in case.

Full Wipe

This involves fully formatting the hard drive and reinstalling the operating system from scratch. A boot virus scan will be run to make sure no viruses are hidden in the memory or the boot sector of the hard drive.