How would I get rid of a stubborn virus in my driver on my computer?
I have scanned it with trend micro, microsoft’s housecall, and others. Will I have to wipe out my computer and take it back to factory?
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Tagged with: housecall • microsoft • trend micro
Filed under: Clean Up Computer
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You may not have a virus. I’m assuming that you have some symptom (too slow, slower than it used to be, Outlook (or something) doesn’t work anymore, …). This could be the result of virus, but may be the result of a mal-interaction between otherwise properly functioning software. Is your driver (or all of them) up to date and specified for use with the card and operating system you have? Might chekc your vendor sites for more recent drivers. Are your BIOS setting scompatible with the assumptions of your installed software and hardware? Does anything change when you disable power monitoring or enable it?
If you installed a Service Pak (to use the MS term) your operating system doesn’t now do exactly what it used to do, in some way which a program might have relied upon. SP2 for XP was infamous for breaking other software.
Likewise, installing a new application (or update) might have changed a DLL file in a way which some other program can’t cope with. Reinstalling the other program reinstalls the version of the DLL file which it needs, but this breaks the first program. And round and round we go. The reason this is possible at all is that MS maldesigned the DLL interface long ago. Nothing tracks the necessary dependecies most o fthe time, which leads to miserable problems. It’s called DLL hell. Supposedly, Vista will finally fix some of this when it finally comes out. And so on and on.
But the answer is that, if properly using an anti-virus program makes no difference, and applying several anti-spyware programs doesn’t either, you might indeed have to reinstall your OS from the disks you got with the machine. If you didn’t get any, call your vendor, give them every ID number you can find for your system, and proceed. BE SURE to backup your data, before you try any of this. Beware, of course, that you may be backing up the virus too. If it’s hiding in some Word file, or in the executable portion of some program you installed on the machine, this will be a problem, and there are no good solutions, except a properly working anti-virus program.
I personally prefer F-secure, if only because they were willing to treat the Sony Records rootkit (on quite a few (millions) of their music CDs in the last few years) as an actual virus when they learned of it. none o fhte others did and some of them had apparently known of it for months, going back to shortly after it was first deployed on Sony CDs. It happens that they’re pretty good otherwise too which is a good thing.
Having reinstalled your OS from the distribution disks, and reinstalled (from their distribution disks as well) all that software you had added to the machine and restored all your data, you’ll be ready to go. You will hope. If the problem persists, you might have a hardware problem which requires a return to the factory. This is unlikely, however.
The lesson, after all that work, is that you should really check for viruses and other malware regularly. Not just talk about how you should. No excuses, no excuse slips, no exemptions, no exceptions. The malware folk don’t take a vacation, on average, so you can’t either.
It might be of some interest to know that some operating systems don’t have this problem. Linux for instance, is much much less susceptible (most importantly for inherent design reasons, and because there are fewer installed Linux systems), but no one in the Linux world will cheerily tell you that no system adminstration is required for a Linux system. You can fool yourself into thinking that’s so for Windows, and various vendors will make noises like that (including Microsoft who have financed several ‘studies’ which ‘show’ that Linux is as susceptible to viruses or as expensive to use as Windows), but it’s all bushwa. Any operating system requires, no exceptions, that it be administered. Failure to do so will result in a system with, most likely, various vulnerabilities and misconfigurations which will make it worse less well than it might and more susceptible to viruses and other malware than it should be. System management by accident and fate is not a reasonable approach to your computer. Mangement by monkeys might be as well.
There are several ways to run Windows software under Linux (if you’re using an Intel/AMD compatible CPU) and some of them are free in the Linux tradition. You may not have to abandon any of the Windows programs you currently use and rely on. The variety and quality of Linux native programs is high and rising, so you may not have to bother as programs may already be in place which can do the work without the complications of running Windows stuff under Linux.
Unfortunately, If you have tried all other anti-virus programs and they have failed then you will have to reset you comp to factory specs. If this doesn’t work, you may have to get another hard drive or computer.
Look for your virus scanners update option — do an update and scan again.
Virus scanners have to be regually updated to work, as virus always mutate.