Remove Personal Antivirus From Windows XP 0
Personal Antivirus is another one of these professionally written rogue antivirus programs that try to extort money from people. The goal of this software is to scare you into thinking your computer is infected with a variety of various Trojans and other malware. Then they offer you their program to clean your computer. Don’t pay them a dime. The people who gave you that program are the ones who infected your computer. Paying them is like paying the mafia not to break your kneecaps. All of these rogue antiviral programs have the same goal in mind. That goal is to extort money from you. Don’t fall for it.
Fortunately, removing the personal antivirus program is fairly straight forward if you have the right tools. The first is a removal tool that runs in dos mode. This tool will cut the program off its knees. It is also very effective at disinfecting other Trojans and rootkits that may have also invaded your computer. You should run this tool first.
Once that tool has finished, go ahead and install this second one. The second tool is a program called SuperAntispyware. It is very effective against these rogue antivirus programs like Personal Antivirus or PAV. There is a free version that will do the job for you. If you want to use it long term I suggest you upgrade to the paid version so that you can set it for automatic scans. This program is actually more effective than most brand name major market antivirus programs. You’ll be hearing more about it as time goes on. This company is really on top of its game when it comes to computer security and threats.
If your computer is not really useable, then you’ll need to download these programs from a different computer. Copy them to a flash drive or burn them to cd. You may even need to rename the executable files that you downloaded. Change the name to anything you want. Some viruses and programs are able to prevent the popular removal tools from running. If you change the tools name, you bypass the virus’ ability to stop it from running. With this new variety of malware, we have to take the removal process to a new level. Sometimes you need to get very creative.
Remove Personal Antivirus from a different computer or a second computer
If the computer is totally useless where you can’t even boot to safe mode, then you may need to pull the hard drive. You can install your hard drive into a second fully functional computer as a second drive. Open My computer. In the menu at the top go to Tools – Folder Options – View – Then select the button that says Show Hidden Files and Folders. Then you can browse to the following locations and delete these folders:
C:\Program Files\Personal Antivirus
C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Personal Antivirus
Then you can put the hard drive back into the original computer. When you first boot up, you will get a couple of error messages because Windows will still try to load PAV even though you deleted it. Now you can go back and run those two tools. They will clean up any remaining references to the program and you are good to go. Leave a comment if you need help.
