It is a fact of living in the modern digital age, that computer viruses are everywhere and despite taking precautions such as installing an internet security solution, you, your computer/laptop and your data are still at risk. For more information, have a look at our Why Internet Security article here.
If you think or know that your computer/laptop has a virus or malware infection, shut it down straight away.
There are several reasons for this:
The infection could jump from the infected computer to other laptops in your network.
Once a virus infection takes hold, part of it’s survival strategy will be to bring down other virus and malware infections thus causing what we call a nested virus infection making the clean up operation much more difficult.
If your laptop/computer is off, the virus or malware cannot do any more harm.
At PC Solutions Perth, we have one of the best equipped computer and laptop repair workshops in Perthshire together with a great deal of experience in virus removal.
Rest assured that we are very protective about your data and we will do everything that we can to protect your files, pictures and music but it must be recognised that some of the viruses start to cause damage and data loss as soon as the virus/malware infection occurs.
We will always try to remove the virus infection via our ‘soft’ clean method as detailed below:
The first step in the cleaning process is to remove the infected hard drive and scan it in a special host computer using a suite of highly effective virus removal tools under the watchful eye of one of our virus removal experts. We will repeatedly scan the infected hard drive in the host until all the infections have been removed.
We then put the hard drive back into your machine and scan it multiple times with the special tools until we are satisfied that all the infections have been removed.. The now clean laptop or computer is put through a series of checks to make sure that it is functioning correctly ie web browsing and Windows Updates etc.
Our virus removal success rate very much depends on the type of virus and how long it has been active on the computer, but we currently enjoy an 80% success rate using our soft clean virus removal method.
It has to be made clear at this point, that some virus do manage to evade detection & therefore cleaning to remain active on the system or dormant but this very rare. In addition, some viruses turn malicious when they detected an attempt to remove the virus infection. When the computer virus turns malicious, it can start deleting data or vital elements of Windows just to cause the maximum pain to the unfortunate computer user.
In this situation, the only solution and indeed the only way that PC Solutions can 100% guarantee a virus free computer is to soft rebuild the laptop or computer from scratch.
In order to protect your data and I must stress that this is our top priority, we image that is to say we make an exact copy of your hard drive onto one of our special computer cloning drives. Once we have cloned your drive, and tested the cloned drive to make sure that we can read your data, we put your original hard drive back into your computer or laptop and start to reinstall Windows and all the Windows updates etc. At the same time, the cloned drive (with your data on it) is put into one of our special virus removal hosts and the data repeatedly scanned with different tools until we are satisfied that your core data is virus free.
No computer or laptop leaves our computer workshop without some form of anti-virus installed. Once your laptop or computer has been fully rebuilt we will install the trial version of Bullguard Internet Security as an additional precaution. I say additional precaution because Bullguard scans every file BEFORE the copying the data across on to the now rebuilt and virus free laptop.
Once the data transfer is finished, we will re-scan the whole machine again just to make sure that the computer is totally virus free.
We can only copy over data such as documents, pictures, music & files. You have to re-install the programs such as Office, your printer software etc etc.
This short video explains the data transfer:
We keep your data on our cloned drive so that is in the unlikely event some of your data was not transferred, we have a secure copy. Please note that we only keep the copy for one month, and at no time during the entire virus removal procedure do we look at any of your data because we totally respect your privacy.
I hope that that this article has given you an insight into the very complex and delicate process of virus removal from computers and laptops and that you will understand when we advise you that our target turn-around time is 3 working days.
We have removed viruses from behind nearly every anti-virus on the market including Norton, MacAfee, Kaspersky, AVG and Microsoft Security Essentials to name but a few.
However we use Bullguard Internet Security in the shop, on our computers and those of our family because we have found it to be the most cost effective and efficient at protecting computers especially from the social network infections that spread so quickly.
