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The Google Redirect Virus: a great site that can help you kill it for good

Our rhubarb patch

Our rhubarb patch

Computer health is something that most of us take for granted. Especially if you have bought and installed a reputable anti virus software and spyware programme  – McAfee in my case. This programme chugs away daily – updating and searching and protecting. Having paid your annual subscription you can relax.

Wrong.

A few weeks ago I began having problems with browsing. I’d click on one site and be redirected to another – Toronto Real Estate, motor parts, shopping selection sites and so on. This started to drive me nuts. I jumped through hoops to avoid the redirects – clicking on the cached pages of the sites that I wanted to visit. The redirect seemed to be worse at the beginning of the day sometimes I could actually check the TV listings in the evening.

However my laptop began to run more and more slowly. I could see that the disk activity light was constantly lit. Writing emails meant several seconds delay between letters – the simple word Hello took 30 seconds. Shortened to the more familiar Hi, an indolent snail on the keyboard would have achieved faster speeds.

Eventually I discovered that my laptop had been infected with the Google Redirect Virus. Apparently this virus can affect search engines such Bing and Yahoo too. It can also affect many other web browsers.

I tried installing various pieces of anti spyware software without success. I visited forums for advice and just found that I was trudging round and round in ever decreasing circles. The computer speed was grinding to a semi halt and there were so many people trying unsuccessfully to remove this virus that I began to give up hope.

As my frustration grew I longed to smack the laptop into shape. In the end I closed the lid gently and stopped using the computer. A pointless, Luddite decision but at least I could catch up on my reading.

Yesterday I was determined to track down a solution. It took some time but eventually I and found this excellent site . Initially, feeling lazy, I just uninstalled McAfee (you need to go to the McAfee to get the software for this) and installed a trial version of Kaspersky Labs. The latter scanned my laptop and picked up two Trojans and two viruses. These were quarantined and suddenly the computer was the speedy boy racer that I’ve come to know and love. However the Google Redirect Virus reappeared after rebooting. Aaaargh…

So I printed off the instructions from deletemalware.blogspot.com and diligently followed every point. The Combofix mentioned in section 6 killed the virus dead. The virus was programmed to reinstall at boot up. When I rebooted two warning windows informed me that the two relevant virus files could not be found. Yey!

So if you are grappling with the Google Redirect Virus please visit this site. If you follow every section you will get rid of the Google Redirect Virus.

Why didn’t McAffee pick up this virus? I’ve switched to Kaspersky as at least it will alert me to viruses on my system. Have you had this virus and if so how did you delete it?


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12 Comments

  1. William Smith

    Great article! Keep it up.

  2. I generally use a Macbook so have never needed to worry about anti virus programmes on that. I do still have a PC and have always used AVG free on it – my programmer brother in law recommended it and it seems to work fine.

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