How to Repair a Virus

Our customers often think a virus can be removed in approximately the same way a legitimate software program can be removed. That is, somehow one taps the “uninstall” button, and then everything is better.

One day, that may be true. In the meantime, it’s a little more elaborate than that. But before telling you how a virus is repaired, please note first how it is not repaired:

Don’t try this at home

Avoid online sources that claim to remove viruses from your computer by “clicking here.” At best, these sites often make the problem much worse, and much harder to fix; at worst, they can install new viruses.

Okay, so let’s say your computer has a virus, or that you suspect it does. Typically, these are the steps we’ll take:

1. Remove the hard drive from your computer.
2. Save your documents, email, pictures and other data and preserve them on a clean external device.
3. Remove the “root kit,” and scan all of the computer’s systems. This can take as much as ten hours, depending on the computer – but don’t let that alarm you. It means we initiate a scan, and then wait for the scan to finish, which can take a long time. But in this phase, you pay only for the set-up time for each scan, which is a very small part of the overall time required to service the computer.
4. After locating all the positions of the virus from the scans, we then remove the virus. This is the technical version of working with tweezers.
5. We restore your computer’s functions, and then test your system to make sure it works.
6. In extreme cases, it’s necessary to reformat your hard disk in order to save the computer.

In a typical case, all of this involves only two hours of billable time at Seattle Tech Services. Some shops string this out to a long and expensive process so I hope that, armed with the knowledge above, you’ll be a smarter consumer when seeking virus removal services for your computer.

In our next blog, we’ll review virus protection software.