Virus & Malware Removal

The single most common thing we see is not a virus at all. It's a web page dressed up as a system alert — sirens, a countdown, a warning that your computer is infected and a phone number for "Microsoft Support". The number is not Microsoft. It's a call center that will ask for remote access and a few hundred dollars.

If that's on your screen right now: don't call the number, don't let anyone connect to your machine, and if you already did, unplug it from the internet and bring it in. If you gave out card details, ring your bank before you ring us — that part is more urgent than the computer.

Nine times out of ten there was never any infection. It's a browser page, and it takes minutes to clear. We would much rather you drove over and paid us nothing to be told that than paid a scammer four hundred dollars.

A real cleanup isn't a single antivirus scan. Modern junk hides across startup entries, scheduled tasks, browser extensions, DNS settings, and services with plausible names. Running one scanner and declaring victory is how a machine ends up back on the bench in three weeks.

We go through it properly: identify what's actually running and what's set to run at boot, remove the payloads and their persistence, reset the browsers and their extensions, check the network settings haven't been redirected, then verify with a second independent scanner so we're not trusting one tool's opinion.

If a machine is deeply compromised — particularly anything that had a keylogger or a remote-access tool on it — the honest answer is a clean reinstall rather than a cleanup. We'll back your files up first, rebuild it, and put everything back. That's still inside the flat $75.

If your files have been encrypted and there's a note demanding payment, be careful of anyone who promises to decrypt them. For most current ransomware strains that isn't possible — the mathematics is not on our side, and companies claiming otherwise are usually just paying the ransom on your behalf with a markup.

What we can realistically do: stop the spread, get the machine clean, work out which files survived, and recover from whatever backups or cloud copies exist — people often have more than they think, in OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud or an old external drive in a drawer.

We'll tell you honestly where you stand rather than selling you hope. And then we'll set up a backup so it can never cost you everything again.

Cleaning the machine without changing anything just resets the clock. Before you collect it we'll make sure the built-in protection is actually switched on and updated, strip out the browser extensions that cause most of the trouble, and set up an ad and script blocker — which stops a surprising share of this at the front door.

We'll also walk you through the two or three habits that account for nearly every infection we see, in plain language, without making you feel foolish for having clicked something. Everyone clicks something eventually. That's what the shop is for.