Computer Cleaning ????

[catesta]

It's official, my computer was attacked by a virus. This is the first time that I know of.

I have an anti-virus program and a firewall, they did the job and deleted the thing, however I didn't know you were supposed to update the program on a regualr basis, so it didn't delete until after the fact.

The problem is now that I believe it is gone, the machine still seems to be suffering from some of the effects left behind.

A friend of mine said I should and need to get my computer cleaned since the open ports need to be closed.

Has anyone had this done? If so does it work, and is it really necessary, or is the computer just shit now?

Keep in mind I'm not a real computer person, so pardon my ignorance and and mis-use of terminology.

Thanks for any help.

[Jim Alfredson]

As long as your virus software database is up to date you should be fine. May I suggest you download a copy (it's free) of Ad-Aware. It checks for little programs called "spyware" that can affect the performance of your machine, among other things.

Ad-Aware

Spybot is another free software that does the same thing.

Spybot

[JSngry]

If you're running Windows XP, you can do a System Restore to a date prior to when the virus hit you, and everything should run like it did before. If you installed new software or put shortcuts on your desktop after the restore point, you'll have to tweak that, but you won't lose any data. It's a nifty tool, that System Restore is.

[wolff]

I've done/do what the two posters above mentioned and I do "disk cleanup"(XP) now and then.

[catesta]

B3-er, I actually just finished downloading Spybot. I was amazed at the crap it tuned up.

JS, I'll give that a try.

[BERIGAN]

Man, this shit gets so annoying!!!! I have twice run into problems just looking for photos for the babes page! (honest, not looking for porn! ) I was doing a google search on the late Johnny Carson Movie time girl Carol Wayne, and came across a link that I think was in German (Or was it Portuguese? )

and when I clicked on the link it was trying to download some software, not like that Gator software crap, this was something that there was no way to back out of ,and even McAfee software thru up it's arms , saying it couldn't do anything, and the popup window(I have pop-up stopper as well, this was one of those gray windows) from the nasty site said if I didn't download software, my computer would be wrecked! So disconnected my DSL, and shut computer off. When it came back, I used system restore to go back a day, and ran a complete check on my harddrive...nothing showed up. And just a day or so ago, I had a similar problem with looking up a obscure female celeb at a foreign site, and got a choice to download some unwanted software, choose no, and it STILL went ahead with it! So did the same thing all over again! Bastards!!!!

[catesta]

Thanks couw, I did the update lastnight.