Does your computer seem to be functioning slowly? The system is locking up and stops responding from time to time? Does it restart on its own and then fail to run normally? How about unusual error message or you are unable access your disk drives? These symptoms all add up to one thing, your computer has been infected with a virus. Here are two ways in which you can try removing viruses and spyware infections from your computer.

A virus is a type of malicious software that is designed to wreak havoc on your computer system. Spyware, on the other hand, pretends to be useful software but is actually designed to get bits and pieces of information from a user’s computer. Did you know that the experts at Sophos Company said that about 40,000 computer viruses are now known to exist? The experts even claim that about 200 new computer viruses are released into the Internet each month.

Automatic Removal

If all else fails and your computer is infected, do not panic. There are things that can be done in order to remove the infestation from your computer. Your anti virus or anti spyware program like MacAfee, Avast, Norton can also serve as automatic virus removal tools, all you need to do is run the anti virus complete PC scan. More often than not with infections, your computer will still start up okay but will perform very slowly and will have a hard time running the anti virus or anti spyware scan. To get around this, start your computer on safe mode and run the virus or spyware scan from there. It should automatically detect the virus or spyware and it will give you an option to do nothing, delete or quarantine.

Manual Removal

There are situations where anti virus or anti spyware will not do the trick of removing the infection automatically. This is where manual virus and spyware removal comes in. This is normally the last resort for computer users that did not do any file backups and want to avoid reformatting that will erase everything on the hard drive. Depending upon the severity of the infection, the approach can greatly differ.

If the computer can still at least start up to the operating system, the tricky part is moving inside since the system will be sluggish with multiple layers of pop up advertisement or error messages. What we need to do is log on to safe mode. Logging into safe mode will do two things - disable programs that we do not need for the troubleshooting like error message pop ups and also disabling some of the infection that slows down the computer. Once the computer is working fast enough, you can download process explorer and autoruns. This program will detect programs running on your computer that you do not need, just be careful using it since it also can mess up your computer even more. After that you can restart your computer and you should be all set.