Laptop of my friend has 120+ potential threats according to Malwarebytes, safe to copy school documents?

[JorenBus]

So the laptop of my friend has been acting up lately so I ran a Malwarebytes scan. It found around 120 potential threats and has placed them in quarantine.

I'm guessing that the easiest solution is to completely wipe the laptop, am I right?

The problem is that she has quite a bit of important school documents on her laptop, is it safe to tranfser these to an external hard drive or not?

If not, how do I fix this without her losing all her school work?

 

Thanks

[Cryosec]

I'd copy the stuff she needs to the external drive, wipe the laptop, boot something like BitDefender rescue (live usb), plug in the drive and scan it (this is just for extra safety). if files are safe, proceed to install windows on laptop and copy back files

[Vantage9]

24 minutes ago, JorenBus said:

So the laptop of my friend has been acting up lately so I ran a Malwarebytes scan. It found around 120 potential threats and has placed them in quarantine.

I'm guessing that the easiest solution is to completely wipe the laptop, am I right?

The problem is that she has quite a bit of important school documents on her laptop, is it safe to tranfser these to an external hard drive or not?

If not, how do I fix this without her losing all her school work?

 

Thanks

 

Wiping the laptop because you found some malware seems a little extreme...

 

• Is the Laptop acting/running better after you quarantined the malware?  Did you run the malware scan a second time to see if the quarantine was effective?
• Have you run Windows Defender or an actual antivirus program? Malwayre Bytes really targets spyrware and adware the most, not the kind of stuff that really HURTS your computer.
• I'd be willing to bet the malware is the just beginning of whats causing the slowdown.  Have you uninstalled all the random crap like Ask Toolbars and Coupon printer software that my coworkers seem to accumulate? 

[Anghammarad]

if there are real 120+ threats on that device, real virus and malwares, not just an "Ask Jeeves" hotbar... then I would use fire to clean it =) 

 

Else there are threats and there are threats... 

 

depending on what they are they may even spread to an external device. if some are macro viruses embedded in documents, you'll just spread the virus further when copying the infected files and opening them on other systems... 

 

there is a good free on demand scanner called Cure It from Dr. Web. that one is quite up to date. always has a different download name.