It may sound horrendous, but a friend of mine who is a veteran, prominent PC guru since the 90's once told me he has a regimen of completely wiping his install (down to reformatting the drive, sometimes replacing it!) and starting fresh every three months. It's not as bad as it looks if you plan it. And it can solve a host of issues. You just have to be very cognizant of your proprietary data, config choices, etc. The magic of a real pen and notebook can prove remarkably effective. OTOH I'm at the opposite extreme: I kept my last PC install up and running for seven years, with no reformat/reinstall needed (thank you, Symantec). Required periodic trips to hell which got easier as Google got deeper, but proved possible. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

 

If you have your firewall and antivirus software running all the time in the background, don't install and run every executable which pops up while browsing, pay attention to where you surf etc, I'd say you are pretty well protected against any viruses or Troians. And also just confirm no spyware with malwarebytes or similar program once a month.

Some good free avtivirus which is not hard on system resources + free malwarebytes anti-malware will do the job. AV runing, and anti-malware check from time to time

Do a system restore, no format or other things!

I helped a friend remove this virus by setting up an alternate login user account and running the removal process from there. I tried a number of ways to remove it prior to the alternate user account only to find that the malware locks your rig up at startup to the point you can not even get into task manager. I cleaned the system and he has not had a problem since. I am guessing though he may have frequented a shady website.

I have had to remove this one from my dads laptop and my girlfriends twice. It can appear in a simple pop up while browsing or in google images or internet streaming sites.

You close a pop up and bang your locked out of your PC. The real name for it is ransomware. Sometimes a system restore in safe will sort it but it didn't the last time for me. I had to use some sort of USB boot program that boots the PC into a dos promt window. I then had to remove the virus manually after doing that.

Its a real pain to get rid off but not to hard once you have seen it once or twice. And yes all the times I`ve seen it, it managed to get through Avast and MSE.

If you ever get a suspicious pop up when browsing like your codec is out of date or MSE is needing updated...just shutdown your browser through task manager because if you even try and close one of those rouge pop ups your screwed.

 

It really does not require a clean install just a little bit of google and reading will sort it

 

Doogie

100% sure there is no virus in the 777 installer as downloaded from our site guys. We scan everything with like 5 different enterprise-level AV programs before they go live.

Not even any question about that in my mind, thanks, Ryan!