Removing Spyware with Hijackthis
Hijackthis is a free utility written by Merjin which is able to make a list of every program running on your PC, along with lists of all of the programs which will load each time you boot into Windows.
It is useful because it allows us to disable programs from loading next time you book into Windows - so we can stop Spyware from loading, making deleting it easier. It is potentially pretty dangerous though - you can easily stop the wrong programs from loading and cause a lot of damage to your computer.
What do you need to do?
- First of all, you need to download HijackThis.
Click the link below and select "Save"
HijackThis v2.02 (392 KB)
Don't just click Run - most of the time it doesn't really matter, but with HijackThis it really does matter - you won't get any backup copies of the programs we remove if you run without first saving.
- When you're asked where you'd like to save the file, save it onto your Desktop. Make sure that you save the file as HijackThis.exe and not just HijackThis: the .exe at the end is important.
- Double click on the icon on your Desktop to load HijackThis. If you get a prompt to ask if you're sure you want to run the program, it's safe to click Run
- You might see a warning to let you know that you can do more harm than good if you're not careful: click OK, we know that already..
- The next screen is the HijackThis welcome screen. You'll have a choice of different modes and functions, but you just need to click the first one called 'Do a system scan and save a logfile'. Your computer will be busy doing the scan for a minute or two after this, so wait patiently..
- Once the scan is complete (the blue bar progress bar along the top will disappear), you'll see a screen like this one with lots of checkboxes followed by lines of text. Leave it open, it'll be useful later...
.. a few seconds later, you'll have another window open - this one will be the one we need right now.
The window is a Notepad window which contains your HijackThis logfile. It doesn't mean anything to you, but it does to me. You need to send me everything you see.
In the Notepad window, click on the Edit menu and then click Select All. Click Edit again, and this time click Copy.
This copies the HijackThis log to your clipboard - now you can scroll down on this webpage and right-click in the big box labelled 'HijackThis Log' and select Paste from the menu which pops up.
This form is intended for use by Digital Red customers only
Don't forget to type in your name and email address too!
Once you press Send Log, you'll be taken to the next page.
