Restoring an old laptop

stefano

My young daughter has upgraded her old laptop to a macbook. I am thinking of taking over her windows laptop, but she claims it has viruses and trojans.
Will a full factory restore soved the problem?

London50

a factory restore will get rid of most infections, but it is not a 100% guarantee for such things as rootkits, bootkits and BIOS.

poppellerant

I agree with London50. Some malware and viruses can find the restore partition or image and infect that also - so when you reinstall, the problem may still be there.

Play it safe, erase the drive and completely reinstall Windows.

esuhl

I'd suggest creating an anti-virus boot disk and booting the laptop with that.

If you have another PC with Avira installed, you can create a Rescue Disk (either a CD or USB image). And then use that to boot the laptop. It's always worked really well for me.

There are plenty of other options available if you don't want to install Avast on another machine:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=antivirus+boot+image

poppellerant wrote: »

Play it safe, erase the drive and completely reinstall Windows.

How would you do that on a PC that only came with a recovery partition and no Windows installation media? Can you download the Win7/8 ISOs direct from Microsoft now?

GunJack

esuhl wrote: »

How would you do that on a PC that only came with a recovery partition and no Windows installation media? Can you download the Win7/8 ISOs direct from Microsoft now?

yes, but you normally need the product key to do so...

J_B

I think that maybe if you were to give the full model make/number and 'service tag' (off the bottom of the machine) as well as which version of Windows, then Nifty would offer to help (as long as he's not on holiday again!!! )

Norman_Castle

My laptop was given to me because of viruses etc. Malwarebytes and other antivirus software sorted it out.

Try the free download https://www.malwarebytes.com/antimalware/

NiftyDigits

J_B wrote: »

I think that maybe if you were to give the full model make/number and 'service tag' (off the bottom of the machine) as well as which version of Windows, then Nifty would offer to help (as long as he's not on holiday again!!! )

Got home last night.
Service Tag is only for DELL.

henm2

Just put Linux mint 17.3 xfce on it. Great system and safe.

fenlander_uk

Knowing the version of Windows is important. If it is W7 or 8.1 you're entitled to a W10 upgrade.

If it's Vista or XP I'd agree with the previous poster: I've put Mint 17.3 MATE on both my old Vista machines and I'm delighted with the result.

musafir05

Make sure you have the drivers to hand.
Create a bootable usb of the correct OS and image.