RE: Scary-ware was installed & need to fix mother-in-law's PC

Good day to everyone!

Apparently, everyone knows that I'm working on our home computers so they decided mother-in-laws PC needed to be tossed in there as well, LOL.

Short background

She has a Compaq Presario desktop, originally came with Vista. Back in 2012, we purchased the Win 7 upgrade for her and installed it. She rarely had troubles.

Then, last week, the grandson's came over and were playing with it and, apparently tried to download something on it and it didn't work. I guess it messed it up enough that they realized there was a problem but didn't know how to fix it.

Needless to say, when she called me last night to say her computer was really funky, I went and brought the tower over here to look at.

There were all sorts of strange screens continually popping up - a variety of supposed backup programs that kept insisting that stuff needed to be backed up, several of those nasty registry restore programs, pc fixer programs and Norton was back on, Mcafee, avg, a bunch of google stuff, my pcbackup, bettermark it, advanced system protector and a bunch of others.

Several of these supposed fixer programs kept coming up and just automatically starting scans, stating that they were in the process of fixing things and wouldn't even close out for me unless I continually kept hitting the x button. One would never close at all, the best that I could do was minimize it.

There were progress bars from all sorts of things going over the screen and I'm thinking no wonder she called in a panic.

The only things I had her running was security essentials and malware bytes and I couldn't even find malwarebytes on the computer.

Anyhow, all of her photos and documents are and have been backed up - I'm very particular about that. So, no worries there. She isn't a heavy user of her PC anyhow. Some bill-paying online, saves some photos, facebook for friends and family, e-mail and I think she plays solitaire. She doesn't even listen to music or play any other online games.

So, I used her windows 7 upgrade disc to do a custom install but noticed that there were 3 windows old files this morning when I sat down to really start doing things.
There is the windows old from when we upgraded from vista to 7, one from last week - so I don't know what the boys did and then there is the current one from me just last night.

My first question is - is it totally safe to completely remove those folders and everything in them, no matter what type of message comes up on the screen saying that it is a system file?

My 2nd question is this - how do I know that all of that scaryware is gone, gone, gone?

Where should I proceed from here and what are the best steps to take?

I didn't notice or maybe don't know how to do what I think would be a clean install as to totally wiping the driving and starting over with just windows 7 but maybe you can't do that type of thing with just an upgrade disc?

I also have the windows 7 install disc that was created from my acer system and yes, that does read and open on her computer but I don't know if it is really any different from her upgrade 7 disk?

She doesn't have any factory recovery disks but I'm wondering if that would have helped anyhow because it would have just reloaded vista right back on it? Not sure if that is existent anywhere on her hard drive??

Anyhow, sort of at a loss here and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks much!

Yes her recovery disks would take her back to Vista, which you don't want.

You can do a clean install from an upgrade disc, assuming it's a bona fide disk and you have the Product Key for that upgrade disc.

Everything needed is here for a perfect Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7.