I've just had a Norton Antivirus pop up alert for a high risk virus on my comp Help! It also say Action taken : unable to repair this file - Action taken :  Access to the file was denied - Virus name : Downloader - Do I still have this virus? I'm a complete technophobe, do I have to do anything???

Phew - all sorted!

Sorry to bring up an old post, but this is exactly what has happened to me.

Some forums seem to be a bit slow and my computer is constantly whirring. I'm a bit of a technophobe too

Please can anyone advise?

Thanks.

Lindsay
x

As a start, have you cleared your cache?

I'm probably not much help as I'm rather a technophobe too, but....

With Norton IS I had endless problems with crashing and ridiculously slow computers, that resolved as soon as I got rid and got AVG free instead. :)

I took my computer to PCWorld (not that I'd particularly recommend them :rolleyes: ) to check for viruses. You could maybe find some friendly (and better) computer shop near you to do that. Allegedly (despite Norton) I had LOADS of viruses on my  computer....

You only need to take the modem box not rest of computer btw. :)

The CPU unit (base unit) is what they will need to check for viruses.  Modem could be built into it but if not that doesn't need to go.

Ah, see I thought that WAS the modem. :rolleyes: Told you I was a technophobe. :D

Glad you got it sorted Lindsay. :)

Make sure your antivirus definitions are up to date. The files change weekly. It might be spyware or malware and antivirus don't work particularly well on those. You can get Microsoft Defender for free and it does a good job. You have to be very careful with spyware removal software as so much of it is spyware itself. Many of them create the pop-ups you are trying to get rid of so when you pay the license you think it worked because they go away but in reality you have just paid them for putting the spyware on your system.

There are loads of non-virus reasons for your system running slowly. You could have a full hard disk or very fragmented hard disk or have hibernate turned on (if you run Windows XP). There's some ideas anyway.

Thanks very much everybody, it is now sorted out. I was worried there for a moment!

Lindsay
xxx