Cleanup Spyware, Popup's and the Nasties

Revised on 08/21/04

This is how I remove Spyware and the like from my clients PCs

Step 1: Okay, start your computer up in Safe Mode. You do this by rebooting or turning on your PC and holding down the F8 key right before the Windows logo appears. On some PCs with this cause an error screen to appear so you might want to try tapping it every second. All your icons will look a little funny and some people might see icons the size of silver dollars, but this is for your own good so grit your teeth and bare it...

Click on Start / Run and enter this command on the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC.

Double-click on the "hosts" file and you'll see a new window appear...

Now scroll down to Notepad and highlight and click OK or just double-click it and that will open up the hosts files in editor mode...

This is my Hosts file. It's just a normal plain jane hosts file. 97% of all Windows users hosts file looks just like this too.

You can highlight the text and copy it then paste it into your hosts file if need be. But this is what a normal hosts file should look like. There are some legitimate programs our there that modify this along with programs to actually help stop spam and such so always make a backup of this file before you save it. You may need something from it in order to make one of those programs to work right. But this would be rare indeed.

Anyway. Cut and paste this into your hosts file and save it, then reboot your computer. I wouldn't be surprised if all your popups and hijackers (if you have them) are gone!

# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp. # # This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows. # # This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each # entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should # be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name. # The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one # space. # # Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual # lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol. # # For example: # # 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server # 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host 127.0.0.1 localhost

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