Help Needed with a Message ...

Mistymaid

No, he's a freelance (but they are in short supply in this neck of the woods)
Kinda lost faith the last time round during the trojan problem when he told me to ship the pc to him because 'You'll have got most of the stuff on your harddrive saved?'

Wipe me 'ard drive - I think not!

[Deleted User]

Mistymaid wrote: »

It's loaded but I haven't tried running it for a couple of months.
This is the reason:
Ccleaner empties the antivirus vault. Now, a few months back I had trouble with trojans and for a couple, instead of repairing them and sending them off into oblivion, I managed to load them into the vault (panicked when pressing the button)
I was told (by the same guy who told me to defrag everyday) that if I emptied the vault the trojans may be released and cause some damage ...
Hence, my trojans sit there and I daren't empty the vault, neither could I find a way to repair them.

Hope you lot are still with me on this ...

(and I didn't think you were shouting really.)

I would suggest you open your anti-virus program and delete all trojans and viruses from the vault. There's no need to keep them in the vault. It's best to delete / remove them.

What anti-virus program do you have installed? I highly recommend AntiVir - http://www.free-av.com/

Steps to do:

1. Open your anti-virus program and delete contents of vault. If this isn't possible, when you uninstall it in step 2 it should remove the content anyway.
2. Unless you have the above, download it, uninstall your current anti-virus program, install the above then reboot
3. Watch to see if your PC does a check disk. It'll take 15 - 45 minutes I'd imagine. If not follow the steps in post 4 then reboot again.
4. Wait for the check disk to complete and log back into Windows.
5. For completeness, open AntiVir, update the virus definitions, then run a full scan. Delete anything it finds.

Mistymaid

I've got the AVG free edition David and nothing else.
I really am a technophobe (but if you lived where I did you might be too!)


Not ignoring you, but got to nip off for a while (goats to milk and things) and I bet the sparky turns up at the same time!

Will my trojans not do any damage if released then????

kwikbreaks

> Will my trojans not do any damage if released then????

They are not like goats in a pen. They are computer files in a special folder which the AV program will (hopefully) have stopped you from accessing.

Emptying the vault is in no way like leaving a gate open. The malware files simply get deleted.

The only reason AV programs have a vault is in case they misidentify something as malware which you actually need and in that event the file could just be returned to the location it was whisked away from if you so chose.

[Deleted User]

Mistymaid wrote: »

Will my trojans not do any damage if released then????

If they're genuine trojans then they may do. DO NOT release them. DELETE them if possible. If not then uninstall AVG.

Simply follow the steps 1 - 5 and you should be fine.

Mistymaid

I meant delete - and I'm going to try it now. If I don't come back send out a search party.

Had to laugh at Kiwi - yep, you've found my level!

Mistymaid

Looking at the vault now and I can't press Delete I can only press Empty Vault.

That's when I'm looking at the full vault, maybe it would let me Delete if I clicked on the individual warnings?

kwikbreaks

Empty Vault will delete the files.

Mistymaid

Sorry for calling you Kiwi, Kwik!
Done it and I'm still up and running ...
Now for the next bit!

kwikbreaks

If you really want reassurance that they were deleted you could always do an AV scan (but there really is no need).

Going back to the daily defrag - that could actually damage the drive over time as it is making it do more work than it otherwise would by increasing the access arm movements. I think defragging a drive is very overrated as a performance booster and rarely if ever bother with it on my own machines.