How To Remove Viruses – Part 2

This article assumes that you have already followed Part 1 in this series of posts. Whether you have used RKill to close any open viruses or are in Safe Mode With Networking you are ready to proceed with virus removal.

Delete Temporary Files – This step is not absolutely essential but it can greatly speed up automated virus removal if you remove temporary files first (and it may actually remove some viruses if they were stored in temporary files). To do this follow our article to remove temporary files with Ccleaner – we recommend using Ccleaner in future on a regular basis anyway to keep your computer running quickly.

Install Malwarebytes Anti-Malware – Download the free version of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (MBAM) from Filehippo here. Close any open programs on your computer and install the program by double clicking the file you just downloaded – a shortcut to MBAM will be placed on your desktop.

Follow the installation prompts and don’t change any default options. At the end of installation you will be asked if you want to update and start MBAM – choose yes to both and click Finish. It will now try to update itself with the latest antivirus definitions from the internet. If the update succeeds, click OK to open the main program and skip to the next step.

If the update fails, and you are sure your computer is connected to the internet, viruses may be preventing the update. MBAM works best if it is up to date so it is worth trying to repair your internet connection if possible – follow our articles on virus proxy servers and a hijacked hosts file to try and regain internet access. If you still can’t get on the internet and the update fails, don’t worry – MBAM may be able to remove most viruses even if it is not updated, at least enough to fix your internet access and let you update it so you can then run it again afterwards.

Use MBAM To Remove Viruses

1. The main program opens at the Scanner tab. Click the radio box next to ‘Perform Full Scan’ then click the Scan button.
2. MBAM will start scanning your computer for viruses – the process may take up to an hour. The number of ‘objects infected’ will hopefully increase (and will be shown in red) as it finds more viruses.
3. Once the scan finishes, MBAM displays a message that the scan completed successfully – click the OK button to continue and return to the main scanner screen.
4. Now click on the ‘Show Results’ button – a screen showing all the infections found on your computer will be displayed.
5. Click on the ‘Remove Selected’ button to start removal of all the listed virus infections.

6. MBAM will now delete all of the infected entries and quarantine them (move them into a safe place).
7. When MBAM has finished removing the malware, it displays the results as a text file in Notepad. Close the Notepad window.
8. MBAM may need to restart your computer to be able to remove some of the entries – if you see a message saying that it needs to restart, allow it to do so.
9. If your computer did not need to restart you can now close MBAM.

Tip: if you have more than 1 user account on your computer you may have traces of virus infection in the other user accounts – to remove these just run MBAM again whilst logged on as each other user but this time you can choose ‘Perform Quick Scan’ rather than ‘Perform Full Scan’.

Finishing Off – If you used MBAM in Safe Mode With Networking, restart your computer normally. Open MBAM by double clicking the program shortcut on your desktop – if it asks to update, let it. Once updated, perform another full scan to see if there are any more viruses found – if there are, remove them as above.

MBAM Removed A Lot – Is The Computer Clean Now?

If MBAM still finds viruses every time you scan, it obviously cannot remove them so you need to continue with other means of removal.

This is where most people go wrong – even if MBAM doesn‘t find any more infections, do not assume that all the viruses have gone – although you may have regained internet access and might have removed the viruses infecting your computer it does not guarantee that you are free from infection. MBAM works very well but it cannot recognize or remove all types of viruses.

To do that you need to continue to Part 3 of this series of articles.

2 thoughts on “How To Remove Viruses – Part 2”

  1. There are viruses that won’t let you install antivirus software once your PC is infected, or even overtake windows explorer making it impossible for you to launch any program or do anything else until you input the unblock code. So the only two ways to cure this windows installation would be:
    1. to remove your hard drive and take it to another computer from where you can manually scan the file system
    2. boot from a cd with antivirus that will perform the system scan for you. I’ve successfully used DrWeb LiveCD, but i’m sure there are others as well.

    Once your PC is infected, you won’t be able to burn an antivirus CD, so you’ll have to do it before hand.

    • Good points – there are more difficult viruses where a boot CD may be needed but they are (fortunately) not very common.

      We will cover boot CDs in later Parts of this series (in our opinion they are more a little more risky for a novice user so we are covering the easier/less risky ways first).

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