Laptop Virus? Steps To Get Your Laptop Working Again And Recovering Your Data

If your laptop is constantly locking up, or you are seeing a lot of popups on your screen, you may have a virus. If you are having these and other symptoms, the information below can help you get your laptop back to normal and get any corrupted or lost files back.

Antivirus Application

If you are running an antivirus application on your computer and have a virus, it should have alerted you. If not, you should still update the software, and then run an antivirus scan to see what it finds.

If it finds a suspected virus, the software will ask if you want to quarantine or delete the file. If you see this popup, choose to quarantine the file and not delete it. When you quarantine a file, the software puts it in a holding area where it cannot cause damage to your computer. The reason why you do not want to delete it is it just may not be a virus, but an important file on your computer. Write down the name of the "virus" and do some research on it to determine if it is in fact, a virus. If it is for sure a virus, you can then delete it. How you do this depends on the virus application you are using.

If you do not have an antivirus application running on your computer, you should install one immediately to protect you from this happening again. If you do not want to purchase this software, there are many free antivirus applications you can download.

Data Recovery

After your computer has been attacked, the hard drive may become corrupted. When this happens, files on on the drive may be deleted or become corrupted

There are programs you can purchase in an electronics store or online that you can use to recover data on your computer. This software scans your hard drive and recovers all files the virus deleted. When you finish downloading or installing the software, it is usually easy to run the scan. When you open the software, it will ask you to select the drive you want to retrieve the lost files from. Because these files are on your laptop's hard drive, the drive you select should be C:. You will then click a button that likely says recover, and let the software scan and recover your files. The software automatically puts the files back where they should go so you will not have to do anything when it finishes.

If the data recovery software did not restore all files, you can hire a data recovery service, who will likely be able to get back files the software could not. If you use your laptop for business, you should immediately take it to a data recovery service instead of trying to perform the recovery on your own.

A data recovery service works great at getting back your lost data, but you should still run regular backups to keep your data safe in case this ever happens again. There are many backup tools you can purchase or download online. They will come with instructions on how to use them.

 

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