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The other day I talked about how to keep you computer secure from autorun viruses and as promised today I am going to show you how you can clean the autorun virus. There are many variants of these autorun trojans out there, their job almost same however determining them is essential before we clean them up.

Determining the Variant

Thought most of these viruses does the same thing, but there may be variants of each of them. For example one variant might save itself in the “windows” directory where as the other might save itself in “windows/system32/” directory.

It is not a hard task to do if you have a couple of tools up in hand. I recommend Hijackthis, Super Spyware Removal and UnhackMe. Hijackthis and Super Spyware Removal are free of cost, where as UnhackMe is free to try.

Generate the log using Hijackthis (I may write a complete tutorial on this later) to find out where the virus has hidden itself.

Enabling Task manager

Most of these kinds of viruses directly affect your task manager and folder options. If you find your task manager not working then use the following registry to

Download this Registry file to enable Task Manager

The Final Cleansing

Now scan your computer with UnhackMe for any rootkits. You may be incited to check and verify each start up service and programs that are tied in with Windows Startup. I advice that after the scan completion you restart your computer and scan it again.

Now make a complete system scan using Super Anti Spyware. This is a great application and is updated almost daily with new malware definitions and over all, its free. It can also be used to restore msconfig utility, task manager, folder options etc that might have been denied access by the malware.

Use a better antivirus, AVG works great for me.

Now follow these steps here at How to protect your computer from autorun viruses to ensure you don’t get any such viruses and malware again

USB Drives are handy these days be it Thumb Drives or External Hard Disks. You can easily find a 4GB drive for less than $5. But the only thing that we really care for is, “speed”. If you are looking for a way to optimize speed for your USB Drives without actually upgrading to USB 3.0 (yes we now have USB 3.0 at 4.8 Gbps transfer rates). The best solutions available for this is to convert the File System to NTFS.

Though Windows Vista and Windows 7 allow you to format a drive with NTFS with ease, Windows XP only allows you to format with FAT and FAT32. However this simple trick you let can format with NTFS in Windows XP if you want to and access it at better speed (or probably compression too if you want).
Open Device manager (Right Click on My Computer Icon and Properties, Click on Hardware Tab and then device manager and open it.)

Search for Disk Drives in the Tree and Select your USB Drives Properties (Right Click, Do i need to say ?)

Under Policies Tab select Optimize for performance. Now this will allow you to format USB Drives with NTFS file system.

Now to format your USB drive, right-click the drive and select format. You will find the NTFS option there now.

There is a lot of advantage in using NTFS over FAT File System if you are using these drives for connecting them to computers. The drawback is other devices (mp3 players, DVD players) may or may not support.

Autorun virus are widely seen these days here right in USB thumb drives, external hard disks, PCs and Laptops. People find it very difficult to remove autorun virus. Well I must admit that it is very difficult for a non IT person to work out for a solution for those viruses because they disable almost [...]

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