Have you been hit by a virus?

@trruk1 (1028)
United States
February 13, 2010 3:06pm CST
Has your computer ever been hit by a virus? Were you able to remove it? I had to reformat a hard drive a year or two ago because we could not get rid of it. That was on the family computer and I am sure it was due to some member of the family (I will not say which) going to dangerous places. But last week my computer got hit. I could find some of the virus files but when I tracked them down and deleted them, the next time I re-booted they were back. I ended up paying about a hundred bucks for a professional with some very sophisticated tools to track it down and kill it. It worked. I do not know how it got past my firewall and my anti-virus software. Anyway, it is gone. If you get hit, do not give up right away. You may be able to fix it and salvage your files. There are some sites offering free help and you always have the option of paying a pro.
2 people like this
12 responses
• United States
14 Feb 10
Get a good, free anti-virus software as your main one. (Avast, MSE, AVG, Avira, etc) and download SUPERAntiSpyware and put the exe on your flashdrive. The reason for this is because viruses are smart these days and will disable known anti-viruses. SUPERAntiSpyware changes its name so it would be random. Example: Shewaahh556 as the application name. It is portable so you can run off of USB.
1 person likes this
@trruk1 (1028)
• United States
14 Feb 10
I have used a couple of the free anti-virus programs. AVG is pretty good. If you go with one of the free programs, be sure to turn off active scanning, or whatever they call it (there are several names but they all mean the same thing). What that does is constantly search the Internet anytime you are online. It searches for new kinds of malware. It makes your protection better because it can find new potential infections before they are widely known. The problem is it runs all the time and it can slow your web surfing to a crawl because it will take up your bandwidth and CPU. On my personal computer I have a paid subscription to McAfee. Costs about 70 bucks a year but it is very good. I do not know how the infection got past it. The malware (a Trojan) uses many names but the basis is something called Vundo. I checked again this morning and it is really gone.
• Indonesia
14 Feb 10
actually its very easy to kill all those virus, regarding if your data isnt important. do you want to know? :) 1. boot to linux via live cd 2. reformat your hard drive to ntfs (all sector) 3. done, your hdd is completely free, just like a new one
1 person likes this
• Indonesia
14 Feb 10
Yeah you right,, and that's for windows to
@connierebel (1557)
• United States
13 Feb 10
My laptop got hit by a virus about a month ago, and it corrupted my Windows OS. I could not get the computer to boot up at all. Because I got the computer used, I didn't have a disc to reboot Windows XP, so I had my computer guy put Linux in it. At least Linux is supposed to be much more secure against viruses. It takes some getting used to, though.
• India
14 Feb 10
There is a lot of times when my computer has gone virus prone and it is because of my fault of not scanning any external devices when connecting them to the computer as it takes a lot if time for scanning the data in pen-drives. Also, as my anti-virus got expired, many times my computer got hit by viruses and trojans. But since then, I only got free trial versions of anti-viruses and have to format some when their time limit expires. I don't have more money to now buy latest anti-virus with license keys so I just manage by using some trial versions of latest softwares by updating them and using the computer the way it is!!
1 person likes this
@monkeylong (3139)
• Guangzhou, China
14 Feb 10
As far as I am concerned, I have the experience that my computer was hit by a rarher troublesome virus.I was so confused by it,which made me change the system of my computer again. I can not rememberhow many times have I change my system of my computer. I just want to have a way that my computer can defend all kinds of virus. BUt still have not found yet.
1 person likes this
• Philippines
14 Feb 10
Yeah, my computer got infected by virus numerous times already. It has also been re-formatted when it got hit by a virus. Right now, I always backup all important files so if ever my computer got struck again by a virus, I can immediately re-format the hard drive of my PC. Actually I don't have any anti-virus installed in my computer so that there won't be any pop-up warnings to tell me that my computer is infected with virus. I'm just being careful not to touch those suspected files and software.
1 person likes this
@irishmist (3814)
• United States
22 Mar 10
I think I did have a virus, went through my whole laptop and could not find the problem, I worked and worked on it, but viruses are well hidden in things we can't see, so I just re-set it to factory settings. It has been fine since.
@rakesh284 (1472)
• India
14 Feb 10
I am learning MCA and I have to do a lot of data transaction. Initially I learned a lesson that computer can be infected even if we have best antivirus. I suffered with some data loss but it was initially then I learned my lesson. I just brought an external portable hard-drive and I used to take the back up of my data in it. Whenever I realized that their has been a lot of data transaction then I used to take its back up in my hard-drive. Even though I have a good antivirus now their appears sometimes a problem that some virus may still corrupt some system files. So now I have different softwares installed for those particular purpose. I have never paid anything for any antivirus. Who will spend money when it is available for free on internet.
@trruk1 (1028)
• United States
14 Feb 10
There are some free anti-virus programs and some of them are pretty good. Backing up files is excellent. I used to copy files to disk and save them that way but since hard drives are so huge these days, I get lazy. External hard drive is good. If you have a Mac, it will ask you when you hook it up if you want to use it to back up files. Say yes and you never have to think about it again. Macs are safer, anyway, because of their design and because the gain in creating something that will attack Macs is much less than if it hits PCs.
• United States
19 Feb 10
Oh yes have been hit by viruses several times. One time was when I had a computer that wasn't even connected to the internet. Back in the days that most software either came on 5 1/4" floppy disks, or 3 1/2 floppy disks, I mean there were the occasional software releases on CD. Remember those days anyone? Unfortunately I was only a teenager at that point and my parents didn't want to pay the money to have someone else fix to fix it, so I just reformatted my entire computer. Not too long ago my significant other and I BOTH got hit by a virus on both of our computers at the same exact time. I was able to fix it...Luckily Avast! 4.8 got rid of the viruses for us. It can be a real pain though to remove viruses.
• United States
22 Feb 10
No the 3 1/2" disks weren't floppy but the 5 1/4" disks were. My computer had both a 3 1/2" and 5 1/4" disk drive on it as well as a 540MB hard drive, and a 2x CD-ROM drive. Man those were the days. I actually had that system up until like 2002, and the last time I booted it up just for the fun of it, it loaded up Windows 95, then i decided to part with it and got rid of it.
@trruk1 (1028)
• United States
22 Feb 10
I certainly do remember floppy disks (they were not floppy, by the way). When we moved up to CDs I thought it was ideal. Then came DVDs. The time will come when you can copy all of your files, word processing, spreadsheets, music, movies, everything, onto a single disk. So any time you look at the news and begin to think that things have deteriorated, remember that some things are a whole lot better than they used to be.
@jaiho2009 (39142)
• Philippines
14 Feb 10
My computer was reformatted due to virus. And it's so sad that some of my files were not recovered anymore. My hard drive was badly hit by a virus from sites that my kids mostly open for games. So,now, my kids were very careful when opening game sites. And also,i always scan our computer for virus even sweep before shutting off.
@anurag3786 (6267)
• India
14 Feb 10
yes before a couple of months my computer was hit by a kind of virus.. and by this my mostly files was being damaged.. but i recovered them by a software.. and after that i scanned my while computer..and find that virus on my computer.. but i format my system on that time and after that i didn't find any virus till that day.. thanking you and keep mylotting always..
• Lithuania
14 Feb 10
I try to ignore the viruses that are on my pc. Some times(once a month) i turn the anti-vir on and scan my pc. Usualy i get like 26 Trojans/Backdoors, 82 harmless viruses and 1 or 2 nasty viruses that couldn't do nothing cause my Windows is already to buggy :D