M17x R1 problems with virus need help!

I have been having all kinds of issues with my M17x R1 over the past few months which has gotten progressively worse. It came to a head this week when my WoW account was hacked (lost all my stuff but Blizz got it back one day later) and I have to wonder if this is related to a virus problem. I am now only playing wow on my new R2 and would like to get your advice on how to go about cleaning my computer.

I do have Norton 360 virus protection and a malware protection software that my school IT suggested. I have also upgraded this once Vista system to Win7 last year. So my question is do I do a clean/reformat or restore to factory like condition when I first got it. What would you suggest?

Thanks!

P.S. I have saved all my important files to an external drive and was wondering if I should run some kind of fool proof viruse/malware scan to make sure that it is virus free? Any advice on that?

 

You don't have to format anything, just leave the infected computer off for a couple days. Keep updating your Norton protected system, then after a couple days of updates and leaving bad computer off, pull infected drive and put it into the protected computer and run Norton. I've dont that for my old HP laptop, and my brother's desktop and both turned out fine.

 

I take a much harder stand when it comes to malware/virus problems, there is some really determined crap out there, and IMO better safe than sorry.

Back up all data and clean install.

then install the virus / malware scanners and check all the saved data files

I have found embeded virus/malware in some of the data files I had backed up and cleaned them during the restore process.

Some of the newer virus/malware infections out there have to be caught before the infection takes hold to ensure they are properly neutralized.

I use both a virus program and a malware scanner like spybot tools.

The malware/spyware stuff can really be a pain with such things as internet explorer hacks and tracking cookies.

 

ESET Nod32 & Malwarebytes and I have no problems... once I actually had to start using cmd prompts to see what was happening in my registry and then clean the registry manually but that was before nod32 since then its been blue skys ofc I'm very careful where I will attempt to go.

 

Blazer,

Be extremely careful about university IT department advice. It is all too often very poor. I think you get way better advice here on this forum than you do in most schools' IT departments. The last two universities I attended had IT that was so bad I still can hardly believe that they haven't disbanded the whole departments. They just kept hiring dummies and flunkies to man "help desks" and they knew NOTHING. I remember needing a DVI-to-VGA adapter plug for a presentation and no one there even knew what a DVI plug was! And the professors? OMG! Several of them couldn't write a basic quicksort program. Forget IT deps! Go NBR forum!

Sabbz is on to something with Nod32. Also, Kaspersky and Panda have rated very well lately. Norton is like a great big resource-hogging virus itself, and the last ratings I read put it somewhat behind the others.

 

there's nothing like a good clean format and fresh reinstall