Best way to clean laptop

[Georgeskal]

Hey guys, Imma be honest my parents never really bought me pc games growing up, and now my financial situation ain't stable so I can't buy them either...I've lived off igg-games and piratebay my whole life, So I'm certain there has to be like a shit ton of viruses and super unnecessary files and random malware running in the background....and prolly save files from games I used to play years ago, What's the best way to like FULLY clean everything without losing some of my other online games like league of legends and genshin impact cz they are pretty big...I never tried backing up online games idk how to works, plus if I put them on a external drive or something won't it also get corrupted with viruses(idk how malware works ngl my external has 3TB of pirated games that I horded my whole life bcz of my 400kbps download speed so it probably already has viruses on it).

[fuzz0r]

Well.

 

Cleaning an infested windows installation can take a lot of work, depending on how stubborn your viruses are.

 

Start off with checking with Malwarebytes - then I'd find a free antivirus tool to scan your hard drive.

[Poinkachu]

1 hour ago, Georgeskal said:

Hey guys, Imma be honest my parents never really bought me pc games growing up, and now my financial situation ain't stable so I can't buy them either...I've lived off igg-games and piratebay my whole life, So I'm certain there has to be like a shit ton of viruses and super unnecessary files and random malware running in the background....and prolly save files from games I used to play years ago, What's the best way to like FULLY clean everything without losing some of my other online games like league of legends and genshin impact cz they are pretty big...I never tried backing up online games idk how to works, plus if I put them on a external drive or something won't it also get corrupted with viruses(idk how malware works ngl my external has 3TB of pirated games that I horded my whole life bcz of my 400kbps download speed so it probably already has viruses on it).

Honestly, the only way to be really sure is to do a clean windows install.

Especially since igg-games has a history of injecting their own DRM into what they give, to the point that someone on reddit made a software to remove it.

 

Also,
If the game files are indeed infected, a malware cleaner might delete them as well, which will make the game not work properly, if at all.

 

Personal suggestion : Whichever path you choose, try to redownload a clean game installer, then back it up to external hdd.
That way you don't have to suffer through redownloading & reupdating everytime you want to clean install or something.
Put the clean installer in the external HDD, then copy paste the updated game folders in the external hdd as well.
That's what I did back then.

Everytime I had to clean install Windows or something, I simply install from installer (Most of the time just for the registry entries), then paste the updated game folder onto the installation folder

If you can confirm that your usual game doesn't even need to be properly installed first, just copy paste the updated folder. (WoW was like this basically).

 

As for your .... downloads... IMHO, stay away from -at the very least- pbay.