When I turned on my PC (Windows XP), I found the background turned to be white and I saw a pop up windows saying my PC is infected with SpyWare virus and asked me to fix it. I don't know if my PC is "really" infected or not (sometimes scam shows such messages too), but I can't get rid of this pop up. I tried to use "System restore" to reverse to a earlier date, but I found I couldn't select any earlier day. Itseems the virus has frozen this feature for me.
What should I do ? Shall I buy a Spyware virus cleanup software ? Is there any FREE tool I can use to fix this problem ?
A couple of programs which ought to get rid of spyware (but not real worms and viruses) are SpyBot S&D and Ad-Aware. I have used both many times; I have Spybot S&D running in the background when I am on Windows. There are lots of others available, many free of charge.