Ever wondered if your computer has a virus or malware on it? Then compare these common symptoms with your own compter’s performance.
The most apparent sign of an infected computer is “slow computer” syndrome: your Internet connection becomes strangely sluggish, or your PC gets slower as you run a few programs on it simultaneously.
Other common symptoms are:
- Your computer may run slower than usual or it could stop frequently, cause crashes or freeze up. An infected computer can also crash and restart by itself or just restart by itself without crashing.
- Worm viruses can interfere your email. Your friends and family members may tell you they received an email with an attachment from you that you did not send.
- Your anti-virus program on your computer may be disabled.
- One of the oldest and most common spyware tricks is to automatically change your Web browser’s default or start-up homepage – the page that first appears when you start your browser or click the “home” button.
- You end up in a strange site you did not click on.
- Your firewall and antivirus programs are frequently turned off automatically.
- You cannot access any security related Websites or you cannot update your anti-virus definitions.
- You are unable to stop the excessive popup windows on your screen that appear from nowhere.
- Your computer (not just your connection speed) slows down significantly whether online or offline.
- You find new programs in the add/remove programs of your control panel which you don’t ever remember installing.
- Strange problems occur within windows, (performance issues, programs not working as they should, etc.)
- Your internet browsing speed becomes very slow since you installed the “ultimate search companion”.
- Strange and unexpected toolbars appear in your web browser and you don’t know how it got there.
- If the computer locks up or fails to respond to any kind of input from the mouse or keyboard, it could be due to an installed kernel-mode rootkit.
- Settings in Windows change without permission. Examples of this could be the screensaver changing or the taskbar hiding itself.
- Web pages or network activities appear to be intermittent or function improperly due to excessive network traffic.
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