A HP Pavillion latop currently in our Boston computer repair shop in Back Bay this morning with serious issues. We quickly discovered that the PC was showing symptoms of infectious malware ranging from Trojan Horses and adware to even more malicious worms and spyware. The intent of most of this malware (malicious software) is to steal your identity, credit card(s), or just simply to wreak havoc on your operating system and programs (software layer), or sometimes physically attack your system components (hardware layer).
What ultimately happens is that many viruses can attack you machine making it either go to a blue screen, or make it almost impossible to do anything on your computer because it is too slow or constantly freezing up. Then the only choice is to find a local computer repair company to assist you, or junk the PC and buy new.
We have around a 95% success rate when we manually remove malware from any PC, regardless of the operating system. This means you don’t have backup your existing data (quarantine it and clean it to ensure you are not carrying any of the infected files when you put them back on your drive later on) to “wipe” or reformat the drive, then reinstall everything from the operating system, drives, Windows updates, your security software (AVG, Norton, etc.), MS Office (if you use MS Worxd, Excel, PPT, Outlook, etc.), and specialty software you might use (e.g. Quickbooks, Photoshop, peripheral device software, etc.), your printer(s), VPN’s etc. and then ultimately your files that you backed-up and cleaned from the old infected drive. Whew!
Pop ups galore and unmountable boot volumes can sometimes mean a full reformat and reinstallation of Windows, especially when the unit comes with Windows Vista or Windows 7. This is not the end of the world.
At the customer’s request we can create drive duplicates so that you do not lose any files once your hard drive is reformatted. Using several powerful deep scanning utilities, we ensure that no infections are carried over when your files are restored. Once again, this is only in the case that a reformat / Windows reinstall is absolutely necessary.
Experiencing such an event can remind you of how important backing up data can be. We have several solutions to help you to backup your data to make the recovery process run smoother in the future. With External drives and programs that automatically backup your drives periodically, we can help you to not lose any of your information. also, having the appropriate antivirus software can prevent the loss from occurring in the first place.
As a computer repair and Boston computer repair company, we do a lot of viurs removal and are constantly testing different anti-virus, anti-spyware (anti-malware) and computer security software. Some of the products that we demo on a regular basis are AVG, Symantec (Norton), Panda, Kasperski, Zone-Alarm, Computer Associates and McAfee. We are aware that none of these are infallable, however, we have found that AVG’s paid version of their Anti-Virus software and the paid version of the AVG Internet Security 8.5 are the best the market has to offer.
On the flip-side we have noticed that on about 95% or more of all malware related issues, the PC is running some version of McAfee. We cannot endorse this product, and frankly are shocked that it is so widely used in today’s market, and endorsed by such large companies as Dell, AOL, Comcast, Verizon, Cox Communication, etc.
