Recovery Disk/Gettting rid of Virus

ffeindadifyr

Hi... A friend of mine has a virus on her laptop. Now I've heard of reformating the hard disk and reintalling windows as a good solution to sort this out - she has a set of recovery disks that came with the machine.

Would these disks format and reintall the Windows software?

Any advice would be great!

mdbarber

sounds like a plan, make sure you back up any data first tho

AHAR

I'd definitely try to clean up the infection before going to the trouble of wiping and reinstalling everything.
The nasty stuff I've come across recently at work has successfully been cleaned up by either Malwarebytes or SDFix (read the instructions carefully for this one).
If you download these tools and find they don't even open, rename them and try again. Some malware blocks popular repair software's filenames.

gavvallance

I got a virus on my laptop through a facebook message last week. I just used the system restore facility to reset it to the condition it was in a couple of days before the virus struck.
That will obviously only work if you can still use the computer enough to do it.
I should stress that I am not much of a computer expert at all, so there may be reasons why this simple method worked for me but might not be the correct thing to do.