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If I scan my whole PC with MalwareBytes and Avira (both free versions) and find nothing, does that mean my computer is unaffected and is completely safe for whatever I want to do?
2013-11-09 10:46:29
Ramandeep,Kindly mark your question as resolved by choosing the best comment and clicking on the tick icon of that comment.
2013-08-25 09:59:24
Ubuntu is very resource hungry and I'm not interested in other distros.
2013-08-25 09:57:04
I'm ended up installing a firewall instead. ZoneAlarm. Thanks for your answers.
2013-08-26 08:10:08
if you suspect open doors you can block the door with ZoneAlarm
2013-08-24 11:52:28
MOST OF THE TIME - YES.Sorry for going all caps but I needed emphasis for that. Both the tools you've mentioned are good to find majority of malwares/viruses. Only in rare instances you would find something which is hard to detect. However prevention is better than cure and you could easily avoid a lot of problems by a little common sense such as not installing suspicious software and preventing physical access to your system to strangers. Sounds obvious but I know tons of people who don't do this.
2013-08-24 10:14:21
in addition you can boot with live cd to scan for malwarehttp://www.sarducd.it/when windows is infected wit malware then it starts to behave abnormally and become slow. Some malwares (rootkits, backdoor...)open ports to send info from your pc to the hacker.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkityou can open command prompt (cmd) with administrative rights and type: netstat -anyou will see lines that begins with tcp or udp, and port number or name you can also type: netstat -anpThe "-p" is to list the process-ID that has the port open. The -an is it to list listening ports you can also use TCPviewhttp://technet.microsoft.com/fr-fr/sysinternals/bb897437.aspx
2013-08-25 10:23:57
you can check here for portshttp://www.emsisoft.com/en/kb/portlist/http://www.auditmypc.com/portyou can use TCPview to close the port if a malware using it, also firewall can do thisClose a Port in Windows 7’s Firewallhttp://maximumpcguides.com/windows-7/block-a-port-in-windows-7s-firewall/
2013-08-24 09:20:54
Not finding malware, viruses, trojans, etc on your system does NOT mean you are completely safe, nor does it mean that your computer is not infected. It just means nothing was detected. It takes a bit of time between when a new piece of malicious code is found in the wild and the detection and "cure" are put into the databases and deployed to the clients doing the scanning. As long as you have a computer that has ever been connected to the Internet or files have been transferred from another source to it, it will never be completely safe.What you can have is satisfaction in knowing that you are REASONABLY safe.