Ok so I am new to this forum and the reason I am here is because I stumbled upon you guys while searching for a way to get rid of a virus that my computer has contracted. I dont know alot about computers or programming, just the basics, and i'm tired of paying the computer shop down the street to clean my computer over and over...so I am in need of help...
Last week my computer started running slowly, especially anything to do with the web. Then I started getting this pop up thing in the bottom right corner of my screen about how I was "unprotected" and needed to register my XP AntiVirus software. I ignored it and continued to use the computer. Now everytime I open my internet browser my homepage takes forever to load and when it finally does it only stays on the screen for a fraction of a second then the screen flashes over to an error page saying what im trying to view is harmful to my computer and whatnot. I can sometimes get it to go to other webpages but only if i click back and refresh and struggle with it. And when I finally get it to work a little bar at the top of the screen comes down saying "The page you are opening is probably contains spyware, adware, etc.. Your system might be at risk, Click here to protect your system with XP antivirus." I can open certain pages but others I cant. My virus protection software poped up the other day saying it had deleted the threat but it is still here, so I ran the program again and deleted all the "XP AntiVirus 2008" stuff I could find. This helped a little, got rid of the desktop shortcut and the little symbol in the bottom right hand corner but I still get the error messages and other stuff everytime I try and access the web.
I am using windows version 5.1 and have Symantec AntiVirus "Version 6/13/2008 rev. 3"
Any help would be greatly appreciated, and as I said earlier, i'm new at this forum and on have general computer knowledge so please bear with me..