I thought it best to explain about virus removal seeing as a few phone enquiries have led to some clients being a little worried that we want to take their beloved PC away to remove the viruses. Virus removal can take anywhere up to 3 days with the viruses that are out there today on the internet.

The new breed of virus is the self replicating trojan horse type like AntiSpyCheck which is a rogue anti-spyware program that preys on the innocent & tries to panic them into paying for the program. Nasty but true unfortunately. This virus can be removed but it re-builds itself upon restarting the PC. I find this pretty amazing stuff & must admire the coding involved when creating such a program but to get it off your PC I need to do quite a lot to your Windows installation to make sure it stays off & this is very time consuming.

Removing viruses is very time consuming as I've just said & if the PC has got a lot of valuable documents on we need to keep them & work on removing the virus(es). Sometimes a PC can have 4 or 5 of these "browser hijacker" viruses on & it actually damages Windows registry so much so that the PC needs to be formatted (wiped) after backing up the documents to DVD or another hard drive. Some people have had up to 50GB (gigabytes) of files to back up & it takes me a long time to complete this process. I'd rather remove viruses than "just wipe it" as other technicians do and I'll only "wipe" a computer then re-install the operating system if it's either too corrupted to fix or there's been a hardware error that's crashed the hard drive etc. Even if I do "wipe" a PC or laptop, I'll back up all documents available prior to doing so and would NEVER go ahead without informing the client of my intentions.
The worst case I've seen was in August 08 when a laptop I worked on was found to have 4872 trojan horse viruses on. Needless to say that this hard drive needed to be wiped :(

This is why I won't sit in your house or office for hours on end. It's uncomfortable to people having a strange 'geek' sitting their house for hours on end & I get bored easily ha ha!

Time is money to me so by collecting your PC & maybe leaving you a loaner PC, I can work on both yours & others in the office up to 6 at a time which is better for us both as I can do my job in peace & in my own time so your assured of a top quality repair. There are people out there advertising virus removal who'll sit in your home or office trying to remove viruses & they'll charge you by the hour but sit there all day clocking up the money. I find this alarming when it can take a whole day to get viruses off and more. Virus removal programs take at least one hour to scan for viruses and then remove them.

I hope that explains virus removal to you a little better than over the phone? :-)

Andy Winter