02/05/2017
Remove Viruses and Malware
Many people still wrestle with infected Windows PCs. If your computer is infected and isn’t working properly, you don’t have to pay someone else to fix it. The Geek Squad doesn’t have any magic tools – they use many of the standard antivirus tools you can use yourself.
To find an antivirus product that actually offers good protection, consult an antivirus test website and see how your antivirus of choice stacks up. If you don’t feel like doing all that research yourself, luckily we’ve done it for you.
Kaspersky and Bitdefender consistently rank in the top of both the AV-Test and AV-Comparatives rankings, and we’ve used both products with good results. They aren’t free, but most of the free antivirus out there is bundling extra nonsense or trying to redirect your search engine to their “secure” solution that isn’t really secure and just shows you more ads or spies on your shopping habits.
For a really deep infection, a good repair place may dig through your autostart entries and registry by hand and manually remove malware that isn’t being caught by tools. However, this can be time-consuming – and if the computer is already so infected, there’s no guarantee all the malware will be removed. In cases like this, they’ll often just reinstall Windows. You can do that yourself, too.
Reinstall the Operating System
Some people think that computers become slower over time and eventually need to be replaced – it’s sad, but true. Other people may take the computer to a repair place when it starts slowing down. When dealing with a computer that’s become bogged down by startup programs and toolbars, a simple Windows reinstall is often the fastest, easiest solution.
This can also help if you’re experiencing other problems with your computer, such as file corruption or weird errors. While it’s often possible to troubleshoot these things by replacing corrupted files and bad drivers, it’s usually faster to just reset Windows back to its factory state.
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