RELATED: Beginner Geek: How to Reinstall Windows on Your Computer This takes more and more time, and you’ll never be 100 percent sure everything is gone, and your system is completely secure.įix Any Infection By Reinstalling Windows To mitigate this problem, you might want to run multiple different antivirus programs, scanning your system with those multiple engines to get a second, third, and maybe even fourth opinions.
If your system is infected and the anti-malware software found and removed an infection - or, even more worryingly, multiple infections - there’s no guarantee your system is completely safe. This scan process takes some time, and it isn’t guaranteed to be 100 percent successful. To really clean up a system, you’ll want to run an antivirus boot disc to scan your Windows system for malware and try to remove it all - or at least reboot into safe mode. RELATED: How to Use An Antivirus Boot Disc or USB Drive to Ensure Your Computer is CleanĪntivirus utilities aren’t perfect. If you find your computer is actually infected by a piece of malware, you don’t know if that’s the only piece of malware that’s infected your computer.Īntivirus Utilities Aren’t Perfect, and Can Take Time
Worse yet, malware can function as a Trojan horse, opening the floodgates to additional malware that it will download and install from the Internet. It can use its access to transmit your personal data, credit card numbers, and passwords over the Internet. The malware can take this chance to burrow deeper into your system, hiding itself from being discovered by installing a rootkit that starts up during the boot process. This is a problem for many different reasons. If malicious software makes it through this protection, it has free rein over your system until it’s discovered and removed. That’s why people run antivirus applications that can check programs before they run, ideally preventing a piece of malware from running even once. The key to securing your computer is ensuring it doesn’t get infected in the first place. RELATED: How to Remove Viruses and Malware on Your Windows PC If One Piece of Malware Slips By, Your Computer is Compromised