Full system cleanups
System cleanup are one of the most common things we do here at Geeks Are Us. There are many reasons out there why you may want to have you system recieve a thorough cleaning. Some of the more popular reasons are:
- System is running very slowly
- Advertisement or pornographic popups
- Messages claiming system is infected
- Inexplicable error messages
While there are lots of other reasons, these are what we hear the most. They are more often than not signs that your computer has an infection of some sort whether it be virus or spyware.
After a system is booked in for a cleanup there are many steps that we take to make sure you get it back in perfect working condition. We like to do a thorough job when cleaning because we have learned that there is no one piece of protection, be it Norton or Mcafee or whatever, that can guarantee your overall security from malware infections. We remove your hard drive (The part that stores your data) from the system and connect it to one of our many Pawn system for the first portion of the cleanup. While connected to one of our pawns we run an array of various virus scanners through your system, we do this because each virus scanner has its own list of viruses and infections that it knows how to get rid of. Running more than one offers much better chances of getting rid of all the viruses on your drive. After your drive has been scanned thoroughly we make sure the drive itself has no issues, a failing hard drive can cause all sorts of issues and has the potential to crash completely which could mean a loss of data, be it pictures, documents, emails or anything else you had on there. The time it takes to complete this phase of the cleanup can vary widely depending on a few factors:
- The speed of the hard drive
- The state of the hard drive, if it is failing it can take much longer to scan
- How big the hard drive is
- How much Data is on the hard drive
- How badly infected the drive is
Generally a combination of these factors can make this process last anywhere between a half a day and two full days.
Phase two of the cleaning is where most of the work is done. Your hard drive is reattached to your computer and we boot it up into safe mode. In safe mode we install our batch of various Antispyware programs and other cleanup tools. We make sure the programs we use are all up to date in order to catch the latest and greatest of infections. We then run through all of the programs one at a time and keep going until all of the malware is removed from your system. This is the phase that gets rid of the more blatant infection signs, such as popups and error messages. We don't just stop at the spyware. We make sure your PC is running at peek performance so other steps are taken as well. We clean up temporary files which have built up over time on your computer hogging space as well as we update your operating system with the latest updates that may be available to it. This makes sure it is up to date in security. One thing to note about the spyware cleanups is that they have to be run again for every other profile that is on your computer. If you have multiple profiles (one for each member of the family) the spyware applications have to be run again for each one. This can greatly increase the time it takes to fully clean up the computer. If we find that there are lots of profiles to go through we will usually call you and give you some suggestions on what we can do to speed the process up for you.
