After literally weeks of work, we have finally
seen the end of contractors working on our new home. Our primary go-to guy for
wallpaper, painting and general “fix-that” duties is a fellow named Jim, who
has worked on many projects for us over the years.
A couple of weeks ago, while elbow deep in wallpaper paste, he mentioned that
his computer at home was running erratically and slowly. Being a nice guy, I
told him to bring it over to my house, and I would check it out. After spending
hours, I removed more than 4,000 pieces of spyware, malware, and general trash
from his machine, restoring it to regular performance.
How did his PC get so infected? Well, the machine is shared between himself,
his wife and two daughters, with each user downloading software and visiting
Web sites of their choice. With all that activity, it is very difficult to keep
malware and other nefarious software bits from taking up residence.
Many times spyware/malware enters your computer if you click on an embedded
link in an e-mail. Never click on such links. If you want to check the status
of any of your online accounts, never use embedded links — always type the address you want to go to in
the address box of your Web browser.
A side note to this is that I recently received an e-mail supposedly from Pay
Pal, saying that my account had been suspended and to click on this link to
reactivate it. A careful review of this “phishing” e-mail revealed a misspelled
word. Anytime you see bad grammar or misspelled words, the e-mail is bogus.
How do you know when a PC has become infected? If it starts up slowly, displays
firewall messages indicating strange programs are trying to access the
Internet, or redirects your primary home page to one that is trying to sell you
steroids, and steroids is misspelled, the PC is infected.
Remember that while the typical office or home PC is a complex device, and
software programs work in Byzantine ways, everything your computer does, it
does for a reason. Once malware gets into your computer, it tries to connect to
its “master” over the Internet to deliver your usernames, passwords, account
numbers, and other information while finding out what the latest “spam” e-mail
its master wants delivered to every name in your Microsoft Outlook address
book.
Many users subscribe to services that claim to protect and defend a PC from
spyware/malware invasions. Without naming names, I must say that I have little
faith in these services. My friend Jim’s computer was “protected” by one of the
nationally recognized protection programs, and he collected thousands of pieces
of Internet-borne spyware while his “protection” was in full force.
You can wash your car, but it gets dirty driving it around. If you are going to
use the Internet, you are going to pick up malware along the way. What should
you do? I’ve devised the following program over the past couple of years, and have
had minimal problems with any of the three computers we use for our business
and personal matters. The keys are protection and cleaning.
For protection, every personal computer should have a firewall software program
installed and operating. The one I recommend is Zone Alarm, available for free
at zonealarm.com. I find Zone Alarm superior to other products because it
always tells you what it is doing, and it monitors programs that are either
trying to get into your computer or that are within your computer and trying to
get to the Internet. Once you have Zone Alarm going, you have a good protection
system in place.
Now for the cleaning. This is a six-step process that involves anti-virus
scanning, malware removal, Windows registry cleaning, and a couple of hard disk
servicing procedures.
The first step is anti-virus scanning. Use AVG, a free program from
grisoft.com. Download the program, pick up the updates, and scan your computer.
This can take more than one hour, during which time your PC may run very
slowly. AVG will find most virus-signatured programs in your machine and remove
them.
The next agenda item is malware removal. Two tools are used here: Spybot Search
and Destroy (http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/) and Ad Aware from
lavasoft.com. Once again, download these free programs, get the updates and
scrape the crud from your PC. Because these two programs use different
techniques, they each will find different spyware/malware infections.
There are some infestations that these two programs cannot handle. When I ran
Spybot on Jim’s PC, it would get halfway through a scan when a message popped
up “Scan aborted by user” and the software would quit. The spyware in his
computer was set to defeat Spybot’s attempts to remove it.
This was the time to break out the credit card and purchase the heavy
artillery. Introducing Spyware Doctor (http://www.pctools.com/spyware-doctor),
a $30 antispyware program that will really flatten the bugs in your machine.
You can download and run the program for free, and it will scan your machine
and show you all the bugs you have. However, you need to pay the $30 to get
them removed. The fee is good for a year, and this is a great program to use if
Ad Aware and Spybot will not do the job.
Once you have the spyware out of your machine, it is time to clean up the
Windows Registry. This part of Windows software tends to collect a lot of
unnecessary debris, which can slow down your system performance. I use Reg Vac
(regvac.com) to clean out unused registry items.
Now we go to disk maintenance. As you write, save and modify files, the file
management system in your PC will end up saving some parts of a file on one
section of the hard drive, and other parts in other sections. This process is
called “fragmentation” and will slow down your machine when you are accessing
files.
To fix this, run the “defragmentation” program available in Windows. To get
there, do this:
- Start>My Computer;
- Right click your hard drive, highlight “Properties” and click;
- Open the “Tools” tab at the top of the window, and click “Defragment
Now” in the center.
Make your selections and launch the defragmentation process. Be warned, this
can take more than an hour on a large volume disk, but it is well worth the
time for the increased performance achieved.
The second disk maintenance item is found in the same window as the
defragmentation tool. It is called “Error Checking.” Hard drives spin very
quickly, and high volume use or minor defects in the drive can create errors on
the hard disk. If you gather enough disk errors, your hard drive can totally
fail, leaving you with a dead machine and a very upset stomach.
“Error Checking” will scan each and every sector of a hard drive, used or
unused, and verify that it is working properly. If it finds a bad sector on the
drive, it will attempt to move any data recoverable from the bad sector, place
it into a good sector, and designate that the bad sector should not be used in
the future.
Usually when you try to run “Error Checking” in Windows XP, the program says it
cannot do it right now, and asks if you would like to run the utility at the
next startup. Select yes, and click “shutdown” and “restart” to get the error
checking going. As with disk defragmentation, this process can take upwards of
45 minutes to an hour to complete, and you will be unable to use your machine
during the process. I usually start it when I’m going to bed.
After running all these programs, a wise computer user will set a “Restore”
point in Windows, so that if needed or wanted, the machine can be restored to
the relatively pristine state achieved after the thorough cleansing process.
It is best to perform all these steps at least once a month on any computers
used for Internet access. I know it seems like a lot of work, but once you have
the programs installed, they run pretty quickly. Remember to always get the
updates for the anti-virus and anti-malware detection programs — new virus
variants are unleashed every day on the Internet, and your cleaning programs
are only as good as the latest update.
You will sleep better knowing your computers are not unwittingly contributing
to the billions of pieces of spam e-mail transmitted by infected computers
every single day.
