If your computer is exhibiting strange behaviour, doing things you can't control, and/or running much slower than usual, it's likely that you have been infected with a virus or spyware.

Symptoms may include a longer-than-normal boot time, unpredictable program behaviour, baffling changes in file sizes and an inability to boot. However, it is important to distinguish between virus symptoms and those that come from corrupted system files (e.g. drivers), which can look very similar.

Some 'malware' is just annoying when it keeps popping up advertisements, or perhaps embarrassing when it redirects you to 'adult' sites, but others can be extremely malicious and do catastrophic damage to your operating system.

Cleaning

Removal of most viruses, trojans and spyware is possible using a reputable anti-virus package, but some variants can be quite difficult to detect and remove without further manual intervention. We can analyse your system and take the necessary steps to get you up and running again.

Please note that it's unlikely that any single anti-virus program will detect and clean all traces of all malware, and I quite often find it necessary to use multiple software packages and manual techniques to achieve a thorough 'clean'.

A single virus scan can take more than an hour to perform (depending on the number of files on the system) and several scans can take a long time. For this reason, I don't usually perform virus removal on-site, and I don't charge by the hour - I charge a fixed rate of £35 no matter how long it takes me.

There may also be the rare occasion when the system has been so badly corrupted the only practical remedy is to format the hard drive and re-install the operating system. Under these circumstances, I can make backups of your important data and user profiles before re-building your system.