how do staples and best buy remove spyware or malware?

edee · 30 May 2013

macgig said:

well said edee.

this PC i'm working on now, I'm certain I removed all the spyware the first go around. but it's infected again. I'm pretty certain its user error... I've seen this many times since I've been doing PC work on the side. Most of my clients barely know how to turn a PC on... they buy a PC, get on the web, and start clicking on anything and everything they see and downloading everything... things they know nothing about. it does not take long before the entire machine is infected.

I feel your pain bud, I have a relative that is computer illiterate, he's been using them a long time but still is computer illiterate.... he is CONSTANTLY having problems and getting infections I have to remove. When I ask him what happened? the answer always is "I don't know, the computer just started acting funny"

It idiocy of most people makes me laugh though, and people wonder why naked pictures and videos of their wife's and girlfriend's wind up plastered all over the web.

Because YOU HAVE TO KNOW if you bring your tower or laptop into Best Buy or Staples with that kind of content on it, you can BEST BELIEVE it's going to wind up in their possession and all over the web. Because the very FIRST thing they are going to do before they fix your computer is scrounge through your system to see what they can find.
Believe me these guys are buy no shape of the word "techs", they run just your basic software as I mentioned previously that can be found anywhere on the web for free, if it works fine if not, you'll get a call saying your HDD needs to be reformatted and the OS needs to be reinstalled, and for the completely computer illiterate they will probably talk you into buying a new HDD "Just to make sure the problem is gone"

edee · 30 May 2013

UsernameIssues said:

But the problem with cleaning up after an infection is: can you ever repair all of the damage done? Will the system be "as good as new"?

The best thing to do if you are ever "unsure" if the infection of the virus or malware is completely removed and the computer is still acting buggy is to Wipe the drive and do a clean install of the OS. Of course this is only in severe cases of someone that has infections out the ying yang.
This is especially true with MBR viruses also, by wiping the drive and doing a clean install it will ensure the Master Boot Record gets re written and the virus cannot replicate itself, just simply doing a system restore to a previous point in time will NOT work with a MBR virus or Trojan, the master boot record needs to be completely re written in order to eradicate the virus or trojan completely, I have seen it 100 times, even if you use 3rd party tools on the MBR to remove the infection and it tells you the infection has been removed, the computer is just never the same after that, that's why I recommend wiping the drive and doing a clean install.

But for milder cases with one or a couple of infections (non MBR of course) 99.9% of the time the infection is removed and the OS operates as normal.