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I have never had a virus I couldn't remove by using a combination of Avast free edition, lavasoft ad-aware free edition, Hijackthis, msconfig, and the handy delete key.

If you bought a computer from any major store, or dell, and it came with antivirus software, your best bet is probably to delete it, because there is a very high chance that it sucks.

Worst case scenario: set the bios to boot from cd, put in windows cd. Go!

bcombs wrote:Wes has been on a Mac for too long, these days it's boot to Windows PE and run diskpart.

I still use XP, just on parallels!

Extended steps:
Backup important stuff
fdisk (or just delete and recreate the partitions from the XP install)
reinstall xp
install some av software/anti-malware stuff
get reinfected within a couple months
go back to the first step and repeat every couple months.

You could also spend some time really learning best practices, etc for XP, and then maybe go six months between infections. Or just get a mac. None, and I mean none, of the people that I have sorta converted over the last few years have regretted it, and everyone that I have talked to can't understand why they waited so long in the first place.

And, yes I know you can make xp/vista pretty safe and a mac less safe so. But both require effort from the out of the box settings.

Can't say I've had experience removing a virus...however, I cannot recommend Norton (an upgrade caused major headaches for me a while back). Save your $ and go with something different (I use AVG these days).

As long as you don't use IE, or outlook, and you don't do anything stupid while looking for porn, you really shouldn't get more than 1 bad infection every 1-2 years, and if you have the proper things installed, you'll probably be able to fix it in under an hour without having to reinstall windows.

Other obvious things to do are to get a cheap router if you don't already have one, helps to not be naked on the internetz and the router firewall will help.

Also if it hasn't already become obvious to everybody on the internet...if you go to some site and a window pops up saying: "omg you have spyware, download this to fix it!!!!" for the love of god, or whatever you pray to, don't do it.

Norton/Symantec home edition sucks. I personally like Kaspersky but there's a few other good ones out there too (Avast, AVG, and others).

In order to remove a virus, you need to run the scan while the virus is not in memory as stated above; you do this by using a boot disk or scanning remotely.

Your AV program should update several times per day automatically. This is important. You should also run full scans at least weekly.

Oh yeah, and quit surfing the donkey porn sites. Probably 90% of viruses are self inflicted, the other 10% are through carelessness.

Running XP as a limited user will prevent a whole lot of problems. When you need to install programs, login as an admin or learn the 'runas' command.