Viruses and other types of malware are a common threat that PC users face. When your computer system gets infected, it can wreak all kinds of annoying havoc on your computer. In worst case scenarios, a bad infection can render your computer system completely useless! So when you find that your computer has an infection, it is important to clean it off as quickly and as thoroughly as you can. Most people know that they need a good strong anti virus p

rogram to do this with, but what they don't know is that just running that scan is often not enough to clean a system completely.

If you get a virus infection, you can clean it off thoroughly without having to drag the whole system out to a computer repair professional and paying a bundle of money for the privilege. One way to make sure that your system is getting thoroughly clean when you run your virus scans and repairs is to actually disable System Restore in Windows.

System Restore is a tool that makes snapshots of your computer and stores them for later. If you have a problem, you can go to System Restore, go back to one of those earlier snapshots, and restore the system to that point in time. The idea is that you can “rewind” your PC back to a time before the problem occurred and fix it. This is great, except viruses and spyware can hide in those restore files. If your computer takes a snapshot to create a restore point while your system is infected, then that infection can be saved along with the other data in the restore point. You can run your anti virus programs and clean the system to your heart's content, but it won't touch the System Restore files, because they are kept in a place out of reach of most anti virus software. Then when you reboot your computer, the virus infection can replicate and come right back, because it was not really gone in the first place! That's something nobody wants.

Fortunately, you can easily avoid this problem during a virus clean up by disabling System Restore entirely. Disabling the utility automatically deletes all of the restore points, which then automatically deletes any potentially harmful data that might be hiding in them. If you are running Windows XP, right click on the My Computer icon and choose Properties. Click the System Restore tab and check “Turn off System Restore” or “Turn off System Restore on all drives.” Then click Apply. It will tell you that you are deleting all existing restore points, so click Yes there and then click OK. After you are done cleaning your PC thoroughly, you can turn System Restore back on, if you want!