Easy Tech Talk » Anti Virus

Conficker Virus Removal

Doug — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 19:12:16 +0000

Recently I had the pleasure of removing the Conficker virus from my machine at home and at work and wanted to share a tool I found that helped me out tremendously.

First of all the Conficker virus is a pretty aggressive bot-net creating virus that spread throughout the internet a few months ago but recently a new variant came up and started infecting computers again. For those of you who don’t know, a bot-net is a large group of infected computers that virus software creators gain access to after their virus infects computers and it allows them to have control over this group of computers to do whatever they want to such as hacking or other malicious acts.

The Conficker virus will do a list of things to your machine to hide the fact that you are infected such as disabling your Windows Automatic Updates, disabling anti virus software updates, and blocking certain websites that would provide help on updating either Windows or your anti virus. Luckily there are companies out there that make virus removal tools to help get rid of these types of viruses.

Enigma software has been the best removal tool I’ve used to date, it’s fast and simple to use and doesn’t really require any input on your part except for hitting a button or two. You can download the Conficker removal tool here. (the link will automatically kick off the download) For those of you who want to do a little more research first, you can visit Enigma Software’s homepage here.

Now I want to make it clear, due to the recent FTC regulation change (opens a pdf document) that this is NOT a sponsored post, but a helpful post that you will hopefully pass onto your friends to help them find out if they’ve got the Conficker virus or not. So pass it on.

Got any other good virus removal tools? Share them in the comments section or send me an email

When should you run anti spyware / anti virus?

Doug — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 04:53:38 +0000

Does your computer run like it used to? Maybe it’s struggling to even start up? You can prevent this from happening in the future as long as you run your anti spyware and anti virus software frequently. There is no set amount of times you should run these programs, but I feel that your anti spyware programs should be run at least once a week if you’re on the computer all the time, and once every 2 weeks if you only use the computer a couple of days out of the week.

Your anti virus on the other hand should be automatically running in the background, which is known as “resident” or “resident protection”. Even though the program is running on its own I still think it’s a good idea to run this at least once a month manually.

The key to both of these programs is that they are up to date. Making sure your definitions are the most recent versions for both your anti virus and anti spyware programs is very important. New viruses come out faster than the companies can write ways to stop them and if you’re not up to date, you’ll be on the fast track to a hard drive that been eaten by things like Sasser, and Trojans. No not the one’s with Helen, although similar in the sense that they both carry things in them, these Trojans carry mean files that will attack your PC.

Keeping up to date is not very tough, you just have to make sure you are vigil and keep on top of it. I opened both my anti spyware program only to find that I was over 100 days behind. Yikes! I hit update as fast as I could because I don’t know what I would do if my computer fell victim to spyware and viruses.

Luckily my anti virus software automatically updates itself, but even this can’t be trusted, as there are viruses that will turn off your anti virus software’s ability to auto-update, and you’ll never know. So it’s a good idea to update both anti virus and anti spyware programs within the same day.
So let this be a reminder to update your software regularly, and scan your PC at least once a week for spyware, and once a month for viruses to keep it running like new.

How often do you update and run your virus and spyware programs?

Some helpful links to promote PC health

Doug — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 04:55:41 +0000

I do some freelance PC repair and I just wanted to share a few links for software that I use when fixing computers that you should visit and get the software provided on each site; as each of them will help you fight off spyware, unscatter your files, and prevent viruses from attacking your computer.

Ad-aware
For ad-aware, CNet.com offers a download link, this software is free to use

SpyBot
The link above will take you to the homepage for SpyBot, choose your language and then download and install. This software is free as well

Avast Antivirus
Download the anti virus software and register for 18 months of free anti virus support. Please follow the install instructions and only install this if you do not already have anti virus protection.

Diskkeeper
This software is a trial download that will allow you to use it for 30 days, if you like it you can purchase the full version. This software is to defrag your hard drive.