Steps to help keep your computer clean and virus free
These below steps are assuming that you already have an up to date and functional anti-virus program running on your computer, and that you are also running daily or weekly anti-virus full scans of all your hard drives, both internal and external hard drives, and on all flash drives that you connect to your computer. If you don’t have an up to date and functional anti-virus program running on your computer you will need to either download a free anti-virus program, or purchase a commercial anti-virus program, which requires an annual subscription, or check with your ISP (Internet Service Provider) to see if they offer you an anti-virus program that is included with your paid internet service, and then install one of these anti-virus programs, and then configure it to run daily or weekly full scans of all your hard drives.
If you already have an up to date and functional anti-virus program running on your computer, but it is not configured to run daily or weekly anti-virus full scans of all your hard drives, configure your anti-virus program to run daily or weekly anti-virus full scans on all your drives. If you need assistance with this, either seek help from the maker of your anti-virus program, or if you got your anti-virus program from your ISP, call them for assistance with this.
These below steps also assume that you already have CCleaner, Malwarebyte’s Anti-Malware and Spybot Search & Destroy installed on your computer. If you do not have all three of these programs installed, search the internet for them, and download and install them on your computer before proceeding with the below steps.
Step 1
Confirm that all your work is saved, and that all running applications are closed before proceeding. Perform Steps 2, 3 & 4 at least once a week, and more often if heavy daily internet browsing occurs, or if you have had someone else using your computer that might be going to web sites that are known to spread infections, like online gambling web sites, and pornography web sites.
The more internet browsing that you do on your computer, the greater your risk that your computer is going to get infected because your computer’s anti-virus program can’t protect you against all known virus, because viruses get created faster than anti-virus programs get updated against those new viruses. No matter how good that you think that your anti-virus program is, or no matter how safe that you think that the web sites that you are visiting are, legitimate web sites get infected all the time. By the time the owners of those web sites are made aware of the infection, and they are able to remove any infections that they find, numerous computers who have visited that web site have already been infected, and a lot of the times owners of those computers don’t even know which web site infected their computer.
It does not matter the order that you run steps 3 and 4. To save time you can run both steps 3 and 4 at the same time, but when running multiple scans, your computer may perform so slow that it may be barely usable, so usually the best time to run these scans is during a time when you will be away from your computer, like when you leave work, or when you go to bed. Step 2 always should be run first, so that all unneeded files on your computer are deleted first, before you run any scans, so that you can reduce scanning time, and to save unnecessary wear and tear on your hard drive scanning files that could have been deleted before the scans are started.
Step 2
Run CCleaner & clean your computer
Step 3
Update & run Malwarebyte’s Anti-Malware scan
Step 4
Update & run Spybot Search & Destroy scan
Step 5
If Malwarebyte’s Anti-Malware & Spybot Search & Destroy scan were clean, then you are finished. If either Malwarebyte’s Anti-Malware or Spybot Search & Destroy scan found objects to delete, then run another scan from which ever program found the objects to be deleted, and keep repeating until both Malwarebyte’s Anti-Malware & Spybot Search & Destroy scans are clean; then you would be finished.