The Sole Witness

This is not a rocket science and you might find similar/same stuff listed on other blogs/websites too but I am posting because for the heck of it. There may be better ways (No, installing anti-virus is NOT one of them!) but this post is about how I have kept my windows machines virus free, WITHOUT an anti-virus.

Most of the times when people ask me to solve their virus problems, my answer is “Format it!” which actually adds up as an additional responsibility on me because they don’t know to or can’t format a PC (this includes my classmates too, what a shame!)

So if you are badly affected by virus, back up the necessary data and format it because however you try to delete the .exe files created by the virus, they will keep getting replicated because the registry entry still exists. (Was that too technical?)

I am assuming you have formatted your C: drive (or whichever partition which has windows installed) but the virus still persists on the system. After you have finished installing a new copy of windows, do not install anything, not even the drivers.  Go to My Computer and click once on the address bar of the explorer window. Type any drive location (except C: ) for example D: F:

Now click search button from the Menu bar and type “*.exe” (without quotes) in the search bar and hit enter. It will show all the .exe files located in the D: drive. Select all using Ctrl+A and delete them. Even if you had trusted .exe files in those, it’s safer to delete because most of the time these are affected. Repeat this for all the drives on your computer (except for C). Reboot and repeat same procedure with each drive to check whether any traces are left or if the machine creates new .exe files. If there are no results matching your .exe file search, the virus has been deleted from the machine. Now you can go ahead and install necessary driver files from the CD. Do not try to execute any .exe file which was already stored on the machine (if you haven’t deleted them yet).

Next thing is securing your computer from threats which come via pen drives, memory cards etc. This is pretty simple but you will have to make a habit of checking it every time you insert the memory cards/pen drives etc.

• After you insert a pendrive onto your system, do NOT open it or do anything with it.
• Straightway go to MS-DOS either by pressing Windows key+ R and than typing cmd or clicking Start->Accessories->Command Prompt. The default directory listing would be c:/<username>/some directory (varies with XP/Vista/Win7).
• Change it to the pendrive partition (if K: ) by typing k: on the prompt.
• Now type ‘attrib’ (without quotes)  and it will show you all the files and directories stored on your pen-drive
• If there is file named ‘autorun.inf’ (or sometime ‘autorun.ini’), there exists a virus on that pen-drive.
• Type “attrib –s –h –r “ (without quotes) to unlock the file attributes
• Type “del autorun.inf” (without quotes) to delete the file
• The autorun.inf file is now deleted and you are free to open the pen drive

Alert:- Untill you delete the autorun file, DO NOT double click or even open pen-drive in any form. It will load the virus onto your computer again so be careful!

If you manage to do this steps each time you insert an external storage device like pen-drive/memory stick etc. the chances of your machine getting affected by viruses are low.

Why not Antivirus?

Now you might be wondering why not let anti-virus do this for you? Sure. Go ahead but remember that antiviruses reduce performance of your PC. They literally keep hogging RAM and Hard disk memory for running and storing updates, logs, truncated files and what not.

My first Windows machine was a AMD Sempron processor having 256 MB RAM with 40 GB hard disk. This is surely not a good environment to let an anti-virus software rule your computer if you want better performance from your machine. I have learnt it the hard way on this machine setup and now though I have a (relatively) killer config notebook and a new desktop, I don’t feel the need of installing antivirus and I can utilize most of my RAM to get a good performance.

As I said earlier, it’s not a rocket science or not a geek secret either. Most of the times you just need to be smarter and careful while handling a windows machine to maintain your machine virus free, especially while dealing with external storage devices.

Few tips which I learned (hard way though)

• Never double click a pen drive unless you verify that there is no autorun.inf file is present in it. Such files are executed only on double clicking the drive on which they are existing
• You can even predict the presence of autorun.inf files on a pen-drive by looking at the icon of the pendrive. If it is similar to other disks, than it’s safe (but always double check). If it’s displaying a folder icon instead of a drive, it contains autorun.inf file.
• Never choose an option in “what you want to do with K:” type of alerts.

This gets bit boring but it’s better than having a virus affected system. But you can skip these steps also by investing only 10-12 minutes of your life in installing a Linux distro (Ubuntu preferred) so you don’t have to worry about viruses for rest of your life.

PS:- I had few screenshots to be uploaded to have better understanding but wordpress upload is behaving weird so just the text part is here.