Good point cottonball. I have watch threads cleaning out infection lasting many days and a 100 plus post to get them clean.
This young lady has a brother that can do a clean install in his sleep in minutes and has guided many others to do the same. Well the others had to stay awake. One clean computer and one happy sister in a very short time.
Ransomware infections can be cleaned in most cases without reinstall. They rarely come with something else, and, according to analysis, many of them are poorly coded (though good at locking you out). Hitman kickstarter or other boot cds/usbs like Norton Power Eraser should handle them (as long as they are updated).
Hi all
I'm really surprised at the advice offered here.
If the infection is a particularly nasty one how can you guarantee that ANY "Cleaning program" probably written before the virus was even THOUGHT of would clean the computer 100%. Also since the OS itself is infected how are you sure that even the OS will behave "Normally".
IMO there is EVER only ONE solution -- COMPLETE RESTORE from an UNINFECTED image. If you don't have one then you'll need to re-format the OS partition and re-install the OS.
ALWAYS KEEP OS IN ITS OWN SEPARATE PARTITION - AND TAKE REGULAR BACKUPS.
If you are doing a load of things on the Internet then DAILY SCAN your system -- if clean Back it up otherwise restore from previous nights backup. A typical W7 image backup won't take you long anyway and even a "Bare metal restore" won't take more than 30 mins even on a large system -- and if you are restoring to an SSD it will be a lot faster than that.
I've restored a W8 partition (similar in size to a typical W7 partition) from a USB3 external Disk to an SSD in around 7 mins. The system had quite large programs too such as adobe CS6 extended -- full suite etc.
Plenty of free backup programs too -- Macrium for example --although I use Acronis.
I repeat again ALWAYS TAKE REGULAR BACKUPS - this advice can't be repeated often enough --in fact a message should ideally appear DAILY -- Have you backed up the OS yet.
Cheers
jimbo
Jombo45: Restore, even from partition is by no means much safer than cleaning using anti-malware tools. If anti-malware tools try to determine problem and fix it, then restoring tries to fix all problems by copying one part of the infected machines disk on top of other.
Backups, that are kept on the same machine are useful for single thing only: restoring the data if something goes wrong and you corrupted/deleted it. If you want increased security, use read-only media like DVDs or reinstall.
That is my 2c.
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