Sooner or later, most users of the Windows Operating System (OS) will have one of those 'episodes' whereby their PC seems to have more of a mind of its own than usual! Virus infection is often the suspect, though this is not always the case. And quite often, where one infection is found, it is accompanied by infections from different and separate viruses or worms. This is because there are many different viruses which exploit the same vulnerabilities within an unprotected system; and where there is one 'unplugged hole', there are usually several! If your system has become sluggish, or your internet connection is a lot less reliable or effective, or the PC reboots itself or crashes on a regular basis, it may well be due to virus activity. With thousands of different types of infection potentially spreading from computer to computer, and a multitude of variants of many of these, there is a very wide range of symptoms possible, from the innocuous, to the seemingly innocuous but quite serious, to the critical and deadly, in terms of data-, OS-, and program-security and integrity.

Even if your PC has Anti-Virus (AV) software, and even if you believe it is up-to-date, it is not always possible to stay ahead of the game. It should also be noted that there is quite a difference between infection and detection. AV software will sometimes report a detection of a suspect piece of software, usually downloaded within an email or behind-the-scenes from a web site, and many users are prone to panic somewhat at such a report. Most of the time, it is just the AV software doing its job, and letting you know that the defences have worked. Sometimes, however, depending on the AV configuration, it will prompt you with a question, asking what you'd like to do about it - there is not always an obvious answer to this question. Do you quarantine it? Try to 'clean' it, or delete the file? Do you click the button labelled 'Stop' (stop what?!), 'Exclude' (exclude what?!) or 'Ignore' (not much of an option!) ???

If the AV reports that it is unable to clean the infected file(s), what do you do? Delete it? A lot of the time this will do the trick, but there are potential complications. For example, these insidious and generally tiny programs which are viruses, worms and trojans, routinely write to the system registry - the operating system's dynamic database and 'nerve centre' - and if it finds that one of its files has been removed, it may at some point simply go and find another one of the same to replace it the next time you establish an Internet connection. Also, there may be a reason why AV is unable to clean it or delete it - it may actually already be in use in memory as a 'system process' . Even attempts to kill that process may fail, due to the 'priority and privileges' assigned to it by the infection program itself.

Whatever your situation, if you suspect a virus infection of one kind or another, TechScope will perform an extensive scan and clean-up operation, and plug the holes which allowed the infection to occur in the first place. We will also provide the information you need to ensure that the chances of a re-occurrence are reduced to an absolute minimum. This generally involves a certain amount of routine effort on your part, but once learned, the habits of this kind of maintenance become second-nature and take very little time to achieve.