# Virus/ Trojan detection



## Expiry (Jan 16, 2012)

Following on from my question about MSE. How do you know when you have a virus or trojan problem and your AV software has missed it?

I ask because my laptop is only a year old - a Sony VIAO - I paid about £750 for it, purposely not going for a cheapy and yet it goes incredibly slowly at times. My broadband speed is reasonable in most tests I do, so I don't think that's the issue.


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## Domski (Jan 16, 2012)

I use SuperAntiSpyware and SpybotS&D:

http://www.superantispyware.com/
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/home/index.html

Both seem pretty good at finding nasties that may have been missed.

Dom


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## Norie (Jan 16, 2012)

Are you sure it's a virus that's slowing things down?

There are plenty of other things that could be the culprit.


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## Expiry (Jan 16, 2012)

Norie said:


> Are you sure it's a virus that's slowing things down?
> 
> There are plenty of other things that could be the culprit.



Hi, Norie. No, I'm not sure at all and I'm hoping it's not. I don't have a massive amount of photos saved on my machine - a couple of thousand, probably. That's it from a file storage perspective.

There's a lot of Sony software that was pre-installed on the machine and I've been slowly weeding out what I think I don't need.

Other than that, I really don't know what to do to improve performance. I'm sure it's not right, though.


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## Norie (Jan 16, 2012)

Where/when is it being slow?

eg startup, using specific applications etc


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## RoryA (Jan 16, 2012)

The Sony preinstalled software is legendary for slowing their computers down.

To check for nasties, you can also try Malwarebytes.


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## Expiry (Jan 16, 2012)

Norie said:


> Where/when is it being slow?
> 
> eg startup, using specific applications etc



Timewise, it's mainly used for web browsing (for some reason, since I bought this laptop for myself, the wife has decided that her old one that was perfectly good for what she wanted, previously, is now not even worth looking at) and photo editing, along with a bit of Excel stuff.

It's mainly the web browsing that I notice it. Very slow moving from page to page at times. As I said, I've checked the up/ download speed and that seems to be ok.


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## mortgageman (Jan 16, 2012)

rorya said:


> The Sony preinstalled software is legendary for slowing their computers down.
> 
> To check for nasties, you can also try Malwarebytes.


 
I had a virus problem until my local guy put Malwarebytes on my computer.
Knock wood - so far so good.  

Gene Klein


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## Norie (Jan 16, 2012)

Expiry

Have you checked out your DNS settings?

I remember I was having problems with slow browsing and I fixed it by changing them from their original 'default' settings.


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## SydneyGeek (Jan 16, 2012)

VIPRE. The best anti-spyware / malware that I have come across. Deals with rootkits as well. 
Something to think about; I have a desktop that was being ridiculously slow, especially when I browsed the web. I was using Firefox as my default browser, and Task Manager showed that it grabbed almost 100% of CPU upon launch. Maybe an incompatible add-in, with the anti-crash component running overtime just to keep the browser running? Anyway, switched to a different default browser (Chrome) and the problem went away. 

Denis


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## diddi (Jan 16, 2012)

have you considered a disk fragmentation problem. i have found that it can make considerable performance change by 

1 using a decent defrag program (ie NOT microsoft supplied)
2 partitioning the OS from the data (better for recovery in case of OS crash)

@ Domski   big tick for superantispyware.  good for really nasty ones.


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## Expiry (Jan 17, 2012)

I ran superantispyware, last night and it detected a couple of Trojans, about 8 adware (although 5 of these where things that I'd happily uploaded and knew what they were) and about 900 cookies.

I've deleted them all, so we'll see if that makes a difference.

Is that number of items a problem or does it really depend on the nature of those files?


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## diddi (Jan 18, 2012)

quite a lot if sites deposit cookies, for various purposes (eg MrExcel cookie stores your "remember me status")  the issue is that some site's cookies store info that other people might find interesting and so arises any number of trojans which scan through your cookies for info and relay the findings to be misused.

i remove my cookies every session.

the trojans might only be few in number but may be anything from a bit of harmless market research to quite nasty.  remove them all


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