The gatekeeper of reality is quantified imagination.
Project Virus Scare
Purpose
The purpose of this tutorial is to remove a virus prompt false-alarm from your computer. Have you ever been surfing the Internet only to have your browser mysteriously disappear and have an alert show up saying that you have suddenly got a virus or signs of one? This step-by-step guide goes through one such false-alarm and how to remove it from your computer. Let's go through one such false-alarm that I received and how I removed it.
Step 1
Different websites are being visited using Internet Explorer. At some point the Internet Explorer window disappears and is replaced by something such as what is shown below.
NOTE: When you experience this type of a prompt, do not click on any of the buttons or click on the close button.
Step 2
Once that prompt appears, open the Temporary Internet Files folder on your computer for whatever User Account you are currently logged into your computer as (commonly the path in File Explorer would be something like "Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files"). You want to be using File Explorer so you can delete the files (assuming you don't want to just clear out the contents of the Temporary Internet Files folder). Keep the File Explorer window open. We will return to it shortly.
Step 3
Open Task Manager. Locate the only instance of Internet Explorer that is running (under the Applications tab); hopefully you only had one instance open. See the image below.
End the process by selecting it and clicking on the "End Task" button.
Step 4
If you do not want to remove all of the files in the Temporary Internet Files folder (which you can do from Start -> Control Panel -> Internet Options), you can see what files were modified or last accessed on the date you got the mysterious prompt. See the image below (these are the files I located which were responsible for the virus prompt false-alarm I had received).
Once you have narrowed down the number of files to that date you can examine the contents of those files by opening them with Notepad (text editor) by copying them out of the Temporary Internet Files folder. To make any progress here, however, requires you have programming knowledge and experience with scripting to recognize what the source code means.
Once you have determined what files were the cause of the prompt, remove them from the Temporary Internet Files folder.
For Experienced Users Only: Quarantining Files
If you are an experienced user, you will probably have copied out the files that were used to take over your web browser with the prompt into a quarantine location where you can examine the mechanics with a bare bones text editor, for example, to learn how it is done so you can better protect yourself in the future.
