Formatting a laptop?

[The Law]

My friend isn't tech savvy and managed to break down his comp with viruses. What's the best course to format and would it delete windows? It has about 30 viruses because he's an idiot so please help us fix it.

[AlwaysFSX]

Start it in safe mode, use things like avast, malwarebytes, glary, and others that some people can think of and see if you can clean it up before attempting to reinstall Windows?

[Bonsai99]

My friend isn't tech savvy and managed to break down his comp with viruses. What's the best course to format and would it delete windows? It has about 30 viruses because he's an idiot so please help us fix it.

Re-install windows.

[zxcvbnmmssdh]

pcdecrapifier.com is god for that kind of stuff. It will auto detect stuff as well as you can look through a list of what you can delete. I run it every so often on my pc.

[SLPNTIM]

do the safe mode thing first and you can usually find guides on how to delete certain viruses. Because when you format windows. EVERYTHING is wiped out. Which should be your last resort.

[The Law]

Start it in safe mode, use things like avast, malwarebytes, glary, and others that some people can think of and see if you can clean it up before attempting to reinstall Windows?

We were trying avast and it's still scanning and counting more viruses. Plus his documents,videos,picture,music (the normal user ones) are all acting nonexistent.

[roberto++]

Put in the windows install CD and select custom install, when you get to which partition to install on, select the laptop drive, delete the partition, then create new partition of the same size. then continue with normal install process.

 

just remember this method will delete all data previously on the drive, so if you do not have the data backed up, do that first. recommend cleaning the pc with virus removal software of your choice, then move the newly clean data over to an external.

 

My friend isn't tech savvy and managed to break down his comp with viruses. What's the best course to format and would it delete windows? It has about 30 viruses because he's an idiot so please help us fix it.

[Ryan Leech]

If he has his cd key and an easily accessible HDD, go ahead and just wipe it. It will be much faster after the reinstall. Unless it's windows 8, then just do a factory reset.

[The Law]

Put in the windows install CD and select custom install, when you get to which partition to install on, select the laptop drive, delete the partition, then create new partition of the same size. then continue with normal install process.

just remember this method will delete all data previously on the drive, so if you do not have the data backed up, do that first. recommend cleaning the pc with virus removal software of your choice, then move the newly clean data over to an external.

His data was already wiped out with the viruses...

[AlwaysFSX]

We were trying avast and it's still scanning and counting more viruses. Plus his documents,videos,picture,music (the normal user ones) are all acting nonexistent.

Well try it in safe mode and see if you can clean it all out first.

[the pokemon kid]

If he has a windows key, then load into safe mode and get his files off the laptop and onto a memory stick (you will then want to scan the memory stick for viruses). Then re-install windows completely and load his clean files back onto the laptop.

If he doesnt have a windows key then load into safe mode and run a virus scan with Avast/ malwarebytes or the like to clear his laptop of any.

[The Law]

The strange thing is no one questioned what he was doing to his comp.

[Bonsai99]

The strange thing is no one questioned what he was doing to his comp.

Doesn't matter too much, all that matters is that it is infected.

But out of curiosity what was he doing?

[mgsstar]

We were trying avast and it's still scanning and counting more viruses. Plus his documents,videos,picture,music (the normal user ones) are all acting nonexistent.

Yeah if it spreaded everywhere including the files I would just reformat it to save the time if you don't have important files on it and have a Windows Disk. But I think you would have to use phone activation after the reformat.

XP:http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307890

Vista: http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/84488-activate-vista-phone.html

7:http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/18715-activate-windows-7-phone.html

8:http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/24636-activate-windows-8-phone.html

[The Law]

Thanks for all the help guys, his computer is clean except the windows store registry is missing and that's the only problem we are having currently.