Viruses and Malware infections including computer monitoring software can play havoc with your computer. Whether you’re using the computer for business or leisure, this can have an effect on your entire life. With this in mind here are 6 ways to spot such a virus or malware on your computer, once you know about the virus you can then take the steps to removing it so you can get back to ordinary life.
Moving in Slow Motion
Is your machine slowing down for no apparent reason? Are you tearing your hair out, waiting for an application to load? This could be a sign of malware. It can affect the time it takes to connect to a network, or the effectiveness of your applications and many other things to do with the running of the computer. However, just because your computer is slow, this does not automatically mean you have a virus or malware. If you are a business, you might want to check with an IT consultancy, or if it’s your personal computer some stores offer advice to customers.
Pop Up
Pop ups, because of their sheer annoying nature, will seem to appear at the most inappropriate times. Having porn pop up while you’re trying to show your mother-in-law where you work could not be more embarrassing. So as soon as you spot pop ups, especially if your browser is off when they appear, be suspicious. This is a very clear sign of malware on your computer so act quickly to prevent any more embarrassing moments.
The Whirring Hard drive
Check your hard drive’s status. If you’ve got no other applications open and the hard drive is still whirring, spluttering and generally going crazy, then you’ve got a problem. To check the hard drive usage you can view the activity on your computer screen. Or you can just listen to the box and see if the lights are blinking constantly. Viruses can be working their wicked ways in the background causing more and more havoc to your hard drive, so keeping an eye on how things are going will mean you’ll spot a problem a mile off.
Come Back Home Page
Has your home page changed recently? This could be because you’ve accidentally clicked a yes button somewhere, or it could be you have malware on your computer. Perhaps before you take any drastic action, try changing it back and see if the same thing happens again.
Anti-Virus Anti-Malware.
Finally, the obvious solution to detecting whether you have these viruses is to get yourself computer monitoring software or anti-virus/malware programs. These will detect any dodgy stuff for you and in most cases eradicate it too. Some automatically do the job, whereas others you will need to manually press the check button, but you’ll know what will work for you. However, before you jump on this advice and buy all the software you can, you should only have one anti-virus running at any one time. Otherwise one anti-virus will be picking up another as a virus.
