Inspite  of all the security measures you take, your computer gets infected by a virus or worm and it is necessary to disinfect your system somehow. While for some viruses the only 100% reliable method of disinfection is restoring your system from backups, for many common infections this is not really necessary and the virus/worm can be removed quite easily.

Removing the infection:

The worms often schedule themselves to be run automatically when you start your operating system; some of them even register themselves to be run when any other application is started. Removing such a worm is not as simple as deleting it - when you just delete the worm file, your operating system might not be able to start your applications (such as Explorer) any more.

So, in order to properly remove the worm from your computer, it is often necessary to make additional fixes in your system registry, delete the links from your Startup Folder etc. Here the Virus Cleaner comes - it will find and remove selected worms from your computer, as well as fix the registry and startup items to make sure your system will work correctly after the disinfection.

Many worms - when activated - create additional working files on your hard disk. Even though these files alone are harmless, they are useless and they should not be there. When a Virus Cleaner detects and removes a known worm from your computer, its working/temporary files are removed as well. The same applies for worm-specific registry entries etc.

Steps to Virus/Spyware/Adware Removal:

Inexperienced users believe that a simple virus scanning is enough to remove all the infections on their computer system. However, there are preliminary steps to follow first to get better results during the scanning process.

Step 1: Delete Temporary Files

There are a number of files/folders/programs that you can make use of once and never need again in the future. They tend to accumulate on your system and consume much space on your drive, resulting to slow processing of tasks. To enhance your computer performance while doing a scanning process, we would strongly suggest you to sort and delete them. This will result to a faster and more effective virus scanning process.

Your computer can get infected simply by accessing a website. And information about visited websites is stored in your Temporary Internet Files folder to facilitate an upcoming access to these websites. However, these files can be infected and also tend to take a lot of space in the long run. Deleting these files would allow you to remove corrupted files from your system while allowing your computer to perform faster.

How to delete Temporary Files?

    *  Click on your Start Button and select the Accessories option
    * Choose System Tools and from the list, choose Disk Clean up
    * Let the application run for a while
    * When the scanning process is over, always click on View Files to check whether these files found can be removed from your system
    * You can also check more options in the Files to delete list. Temporary Internet Files, Downloaded Program Files, Offline WebPages as well as the Recycle Bin can be checked.
    * Confirm the changes when prompted and click OK

How to delete Temporary Internet Files?
    * Click on your Start Button and open Control Panel
    * Select Internet Options
    * From the General task, under Temporary Internet Files, choose Delete Cookies and Delete Files.
    * Confirm the changes and click Apply.

Step 2: Get a good all in one Antivirus/Anti Spyware/ Anti Adware program

We would suggest you to get the best programs currently available online. They bear the major advantages of being free and having the all in one virus/Trojans/worms/spyware/adware detection features.

BitDefender

An antivirus / Antispyware that protects against phishing attacks.
Type: Commercial/Free trial

System Requirements:

* Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4
* Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (32/64 bit)
* Windows Vista (32/64 bit)

Kaspersky 7
An antivirus / Antispyware that protects against worms and Trojans.
Type: Commercial/Free Trial

System requirements:

Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional (Service Pack 4 or higher), Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (Service Pack 2 or Higher), Microsoft Windows XP Professional (Service Pack 2 or higher), Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Windows Vista x64.

Hardware and Software Requirements:

50 MB free space on the hard disk, CD-ROM (for installation), Internet connection (for activation and updates), Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher (for updating signatures and the program), Microsoft Windows Installer 2.0.