Removing Spyware

[Grey Fox]

Can you describe the issues that remain AR? It might just be Windows being old now.

[alfred russel]

Can you describe the issues that remain AR? It might just be Windows being old now.

I'm getting ads where there shouldn't be ads. For example, in wikipedia pages (those aren't the only places). I'm being redirected to commercial websites when I click on yahoo search results. I have some funky default search engine I can't change.

I'm going to try the things that viper recommended and I'll post an update of how they went. Unfortunately, I'm not going to have time to mess with my computer for the next week or so.

[katmai]

Stop looking at Porn and pirating software Dorsey!

[lustindarkness]

I use Glary Utilities and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. On my mother in laws laptop I have to clean up a lot of the crap she gets manually because these don't get it automatically.

[alfred russel]

Stop looking at Porn and pirating software Dorsey!

Okay....

[DontSayBanana]

Super Anti Spyware is a pretty decent program.  My company's virus removal pretty much goes thusly:

Install Super Anti Spyware, Malwarebytes Anti Malware, and Spybot Search & Destroy.  Run as much concurrently as possible.  We don't declare it clean until we get clean results from all 3.  If that starts looking to be impossible, we'll break out HijackThis, CWShredder, and the heavier duty tools like that.  If those aren't doing the trick, we've got even heavier duty tools, but at that point, it's so labor-intensive that we'll normally just re-install Windows and only break out the big guns to protect really sensitive data.

[viper37]

I came across a nasty spyware/malware at some point, wich got me infected with more crap because at first, my softwares didn't detect it.

Then my games started exiting to the desktop, and none of my usual solutions worked.  I tried lots and lots and lots of anti-virus/spyware, nothing definately worked on its own.

So, I booted in safe mode with Windows 8.1 (tricky, but doable: hit Windows key + RUN, type "msconfig", go to boot, select "safe boot" and check "network", then restart.

Once there, I pretty much followed this guide.

Eset Online scanner found a few things, including one false positive.  One didn't work, but the others finally got rid of that nastyness.