Hard drive light always on after virus remove

[SanDiegoPC]

Well, I thought I got rid of the virus. I got a bunch of mailer-daemon bounces yesterday from emails I never sent. When I looked at the headers, they were emails from my computer to people I have not communicated with for years.

So I ran MalwareBytes and updated it. Did a full scan and it found zilch. Absolutely nothing. Then did same with AVG. I found a trojan in it's vault and removed it. I used the computer all day yesterday after that. Ran fine. This is a fast build - OC i7 processor and windows7 Pro 64. See build in my sig

To be cautious last night I disabled the network adapter when closing the office for the day at 5PM. This was done to thwart any more emails being sent. This morning when I came in, the hard drive light was on 100% of the time. I rebooted and now it is still flashing almost constantly.

How can I tell what is using my hard disk?

Thanks for any help
Paul in San Diego

 

[Voo]

Well the easiest and simplest way in Win7 is, to just open the resource monitor and look under Disk. That's usually a rather small list of mostly svchost services and a few user apps.

 

[SanDiegoPC]

Well the easiest and simplest way in Win7 is, to just open the resource monitor and look under Disk. That's usually a rather small list of mostly svchost services and a few user apps.

Thanks Voo I'll check it out.

 

[tweakboy]

First off if your on W7 guys you use Microsoft Security Essentials as your anti virus. Not junk third party apps.

Do a virus check with that and make sure its up to date database.

Then boot into safe mode and run spybot, make sure its updated and run it I bet a good chance it will find some stuff and you will remove it and reboot and your all ok now.

If not let me know or us know and we help you more.

 

[SanDiegoPC]

Windows Security Essentials bothers me. I don't know if Microsoft is any good at virus protection - their specialty is the OS, not viruses.

Secondly, I have installed AVG on hundreds of systems over five years and never had an issue with it. Norton OTOH is junk but AVG is a good program. MalwareBytes too, is a staple...it's the now-standard for fighting spyware. MSE is not by any stretch of the imagination, a standard.

I'm not arguing your point that there's other ways of fighting viruses, but as I said I don't trust Microsoft to do so - it's not thier business. Creating an OS is.

 

[Voo]

I'm not arguing your point that there's other ways of fighting viruses, but as I said I don't trust Microsoft to do so - it's not thier business. Creating an OS is.

Yeah obviously MS just took a bunch of people from the kernel team and told them "hey guys know what? From now on you're creating a AV!"

That's just not how it works, MS is a gigantic sw company with lots of different teams with different competences. The office team has often enough ignored best practices from their own company for example.

In most AV tests MSE gets a not too bad score, comparable to other free solutions out there, but the much more important thing for me personally (well the last AV message I had was a fp from AVG [my printer driver *cough*] several years ago) is that the AV is unobtrusive and light weight - two things where MSE is miles better than their competition. Used AVG on XP for years and nothing to say against it, but I'd definitely give MSE a try (as long as you're only using it for a handful PCs)

And a "standard" in AV programs? There are more than a dozen legitimate vendors for that stuff out there and all (including MS) are using rather similar algorithms.

 

[skid00skid00]

Do yourselves a favor, and peruse AVComparatives website for unbiased AV testing.

 

[Zap]

I got a bunch of mailer-daemon bounces yesterday from emails I never sent. When I looked at the headers, they were emails from my computer to people I have not communicated with for years.

Did they actually come from your IP address, or did they just have your email address in the "reply to" header? Many virus remailers will spoof the "reply to" so in reality it often is someone else that is infected, and you just happen to be in their contacts.

Windows Security Essentials bothers me. I don't know if Microsoft is any good at virus protection - their specialty is the OS, not viruses.

Microsoft acquired companies that do antivirus (GeCAD) and antimalware (Giant). In fact, IIRC BITD Giant was one of the better antimalware offerings.

 

[tweakboy]

Soo what happened with your issue. is the light off now.

I told you to go to safe mode and run spybot ,,, and clean it and reboot and your set.. let me let us know whats going on...