So, I have a strange virus on my computer...its hard to describe. Its like, I'll go to open my homepage, then out of nowhere it changes into another page, or it opens up a new tab all on it own. I tried to get a new anti-virus to install, and it won't let me install it. What kind of virus is this? I'm desperate to get rid of it :help:
A very annoying one. Try to download malwarebytes to get rid of it. If you can't, try using a different browser if you have any--sometimes viruses like these are contained to your browser. You could also try to clear the browser's cache to see if that flushes it out. If you still can't rid of it, use system restore to return to a point where your computer worked fine, then get malwarebytes and run it.
It's a browser-hijacker, since it does just that. I use Avast antivirus, but malwarebytes is also good, as is AVG. All three together should be able to kill just about any creepy crawlies on the internet.
I don't use constantly running anti-virus programs. They don't really do shit and suck a lot of performance out of your machine. I just use my common sense when browsing and use Malwarebytes to scan my computer once every two weeks.
My process manager says Avast averages to 7.5 megabytes of RAM usage, which is something I can deal with. It has stopped a handful of threats as well, and being one who used to have the occasional bad virus, I've not had one since. But of course whatever works on a personal basis.
It's not RAM I'm worried about, it's CPU usage. Those programs are always doing something and it's taking up precious CPU bandwidth to do it. I remember when I uninstalled AVG that my games had a noticeable increase in performance. I also remember that whenever my framerate dropped to 5FPS and my HDD started sounding like it would perform seppuku at any second to end its suffering, I just knew AVG had decided to start one of those fucking scans nobody asked for that never even found everything.
Try booting into Safe Mode with Networking to download, install, and run MalwareBytes from there. If it's nothing more than a browser hijacker, that should take care of it. If it's something worse, there's also Windows Defender Offline, for which you'll need to create a CD on another [clean] computer. You then boot this CD in your infected computer, so it can run a virus scan from a safe, read-only (uninfectable) Windows instance (i.e. the one booted from the CD). What is Windows Defender Offline? - Windows Help
Malwarebytes seems to have taken care of the issue ^^ Thanks for the suggestion. Turns out even someone who's been using a computer since the age of 7 needs help here and there lol.
