How to Know if your PC has a Virus or Malware Infection

Learn how to recognize the symptoms of a possible virus, adware, spyware, or malware infection on your computer.

Video Transcription

There are a number of symptoms that can occur that will tell you pretty quick if you have a virus or amount where infection. Typical symptom might be that your computer is slowing down it is not running as fast as it is used to. Now, there are plenty of reasons for computer to slow down and may just need to go tune up but if you have adware or malware or a virus infection then they can slow it down too. Now, usually you are going to know right away if you had an adware infection because you will see little pop up ads coming up on your desktop. You will see ads traveling across back and forth, I mean you maybe seeing some windows open on unexpected link and that is an adware infection and you need to get rid of that right away because it can infect your PC’s performance and also as a violation of your privacy. Another common symptom of a virus are malware infections, is all of a sudden a desktop icon might just disappear. You know like you have a PC software that you use all the time and all of the sudden is it is not just there anymore and the program may not run. The common symptom in the internet browser is the browser becomes unstable, it may open up windows unexpectedly or it may go from one web address to another. Basically if your PC starts showing strange or erratic behavior, in other words, it is doing something that it did used to do, programs do not run quite the way they used to, then you can suspect that there is some sort of malware or virus infection and the best thing to do is to immediately start scanning your computer to remove the infection that might be there. Now, please keep in mind that this infections can happen on a PC even if you have software installed that supposed to stop all these stuff, maybe you already have an antivirus program on your computer that you believe is a good antivirus program and maybe you have an antiSpyware program that you honestly feel is a decent piece of software. But we got to be realistic about this, none of this stuff is absolutely perfect and even though you may have a well known name brand software installation and a security suite that you pay for on your computer, the fact that the matter is that they still fail from time to time and an infection can still get into your PC. So, the thing to do if you noticed your computer slowing down, if you noticed programs are not running the way they used to, if you noticed stranger unusual behavior in your web browser, if you see anything out of the ordinary going on with your PC then right away you need to start scanning your computer for infections and removing the infection. Now, we have a couple of websites that will help you to do that. One, is the Spyware or an Adware removal in blockers, we have tutorials here that will show you step by step how to remove these infections from your PC. We also have another website called Spyware blockers that will show you how to prevent these infections from getting on to your PC. Both of these websites, there is a lot of free software that will help you to clean up your computer and remove any type of infection that is on there. You do not have to spend any money to do this. You can do every bit of absolutely free, it is just going to take some of your time, some patience, and some efforts to clean up your computer and then give it a good tune up. Now, the reason that we have these websites here and the whole purpose behind all of these is because we do not want your nice PC that looks like this to end up looking like this. And look at that screen well, it is not good, is it? And that computer is absolutely toasted. Well, you know this can happen because if you allow an infection to continue, once this begun and once you start seeing the first symptoms of it you can end up going from those little funny symptoms that are going on to what we call the blue screen of death. You can crash your computer and then you are going to end up spending a lot of time, a lot of money unnecessarily cleaning up that PC or you may end up just having a wipe the hard drive clean and reinstalling your operating s