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So, its just another day in your life. You are checking your mails or surfing the internet or trying to enjoy photographs shared by a friend. Suddenly you find your computer behaving funny. You try to write something in Microsoft Word, and the computer writes something else. You try to click a cooking recipe link in Google, and Google takes you to a site from where you can purchase security software. You try to open your internet explorer, and a warning popup comes up saying security of your computer is at stake. You try to visit a particular web-site, and your browser displays something totally different.

And then it strikes you. You might have been hit by a virus. What do you do?

As a normal computer user, I find this quite a common scenario. In 15 years of my personal computer usage, I have faced such situation not less than 15 times on my own machine. Well, that’s not that common. But if you consider the fact that I always keep anti-virus software on my machine up-to-date and I always keep my firewalls up and running and I always keep my operating system up-to-date with Window’s updates, it is quite common. For a normal user who might have missed these things, frequency of this happening would be even higher.

In such situations it is very easy to get panicked, since you neither know what has happened nor how to resolve the situation.

Firstly I can say that if you have any preliminary anti-virus software running & your operating system is fairly up-to-date with routine Windows’ updates, chances are that this is not something major. Even if it is something major, you can’t do much once it has already happened. So, panicking is not going to help. Rather you can cool down and try to think straight. Resolving such things might be easier than you think.

The cleanest & easiest way out is to revert to the last working configuration of your computer if you have such magic button or an option of moving back to a previous system restore point. You might loose some recent download & recent work. If you can afford that, go for it. If you can’t afford to loose any of your work or if you don’t have an option to move back to the last good system, you can follow below steps.

To start with, you should be able to search on the Internet for your problem. For this, the best setup to have is, to have another working computer where you can search for your symptoms and possible solutions, which you can then apply on your infected machine. If you don’t have a working spare machine, you should check if you can access Internet from your infected machine. Internet Explorer is the most vulnerable to virus attacks. So, if your Internet Explorer is not working, then check your Firefox or Google Chrome, which still might work. In worst case scenario, you can try to use your work computer or a friend’s computer for this, which might make the whole process a bit time consuming.

The idea is, you would definitely not be the first person to experience what you are experiencing. Someone somewhere would have gone through what you are going through right now. So, you should be able to find the same problem and solution to that problem maintained somewhere in the vast information container called Internet. The trick is to be able to locate it.

For that, you should be able to express what you are experiencing. If your google is displaying different information pages when you click on certain link, you should be able to rephrase it as “google link redirection” or “google links are redirecting”. If you initially search for information with “google links sending me to different pages”, that is also okay. But from that search, you should be able to pick up the fact that most people would express the issue as “google link redirection” or “google page redirection”, and you should execute the next search with these keywords to get better results.

The keyword with which you choose to search should not be more than 4 or 5 words. As I mentioned before, your first search can be with more words, but before examine results, you should be able to infer how other people explain the same issue in 4 to 5 words.

You narrow down your issue, search the google and start examining the result pages.

The most helpful pages are from security forums where a user would have described his problem and experts would have explained detailed steps about how to resolve it. Virus removal process works on a number of highly powerful free tools available in the market. It’s about using the right tool the right way. That’s where you need guidelines.

Find someone who has experienced the same issue, and confirm that by the end of the thread the victim has mentioned that his problem was resolved after following these steps.

Finding such a thread is the toughest part of the job. Then its all about following the guidelines step by step, which might involve downloading a few free virus removal tools, logging on to your computer in safe mode & cleaning it up.

So, next time when you get struck by a virus, have some patience and get ready to google.