<h1>How to remove a virus from a laptop</h1>

If you want to learn how to remove a virus from a laptop, it's the same way as you would a desktop.

Run you antivirus program and there you go. Though sometimes this is not possible, the one you have isn't effective which we'll deal with later.

Often times a virus likes to hide in the restore points in your computer. To stop this from happening, you need to wipe out all the restore points. For those of you that don't know the difference restore points are not the same as a recovery partition.

The recovery partition allows you to format (delete all files) from your C: drive (hard drive) and start over from the beginning aka: the way the manufacturer built your machine. This will delete all your files, and any virus, malware, trojan horse, adware or spyware you have as well. Though for those of you familiar with a boot sector virus or a rootkit, this is often not the case. Instead of the recovery partition, you can always use your recovery disks if you made or purchased them. This post is about how to remove a virus from a laptop, not the "wonders" of recovery partition/disks. I digress.

Your first move should be to try and use a restore point that was automatically saved and see if that works. If you can't boot into windows, you have other options because it is likely for you to be reading this you have another computer. I'll come back to that later as well.

If going back to a previous restore point does not help then you will need to run your antivirus program. Of course, if you have restore points the virus will simply come back when you reboot the machine. Back in the day this was not the case, but the designers of this little miscreants have gotten smarter as they have watched their work get wiped off the internet and our computers one virus definition at a time.

To wipe out all your restore points in windows xp simply click the start menu (bottom left of your screen) and right click on "My computer" or for Vista and windows 7 users, "Computer" then click properties. On the next window that pops up you'll find "System Restore". Simply click the check box that says "Turn Off System Restore" and it will delete all restore points. This can take between 20 seconds to 20 minutes depending on the speed of your machine.

After you are done wiping out your restore points, you can scan your laptop for a virus, malware, trojan horse, adware or spyware. If the program you have is successful, upon rebooting into windows you will find that the virus, malware, trojan horse, adware or spyware is gone and did not "resurrect". To turn restore points back on, do what I described before, except uncheck the box and hit ok.

If you can't boot into windows, or your antivirus program cannot find the virus, malware, trojan horse, adware, spyware, rootkit or boot sector virus the virus may be defending itself in some way. The next best option besides doing a full system recovery is to buy a universal hard drive adapter (around $40 online), pop out the infected hard drive, hook it up to a computer that works, and run your antivirus program from the working machine on the newly attached infected drive. Generally this takes care of the issue because the virus isn't active unless you boot into windows on the affected drive.

Well, there you have it. Answered the question "How to remove a virus from a laptop"

TechSavvyT,
Answering all your obscure virus, malware, trojan horse, adware, spyware, rootkit, boot sector virus and worm needs.