Do I have a virus on my computer? How can I tell? What test can I run?

Your computer is slowing down.  It’s not like it used to be.  But, then age catches onto the best of us so you start validating your computer’s slowdown.  Then, you say, wait a minute, it’s only a couple years old, it shouldn’t be this slow.

So, you want to know if maybe you caught a nasty little virus, perhaps some malware or the garden-variety spyware.  How can you tell?  Well, you can put on your computer tech hat and try to dig deep inside your registry and look for any funky outlier.  Or you can take a shortcut and find out in about a minute or less.

Here’s how you can perform an online test to determine if you have a virus on your computer:

1. Go to the Bitdefender Online Virus Scan site.
2. Click the “start scanner” icon.
3. Select “Scan now”

Now, I’m not a fan of Bitdefender, but I do like that it has one of the few online computer virus scanners out there that does not force you to download it.  This is not only my paranoia to keep files off my computer, but if you have a gnarly virus, it won’t let you save anything to your computer.  So, this online scanner still will allow you to use it in times of severe computer virus infections.

If you find out you do have a computer virus, well, unless you’re a computer virus specialist, I’d recommend taking it into the big guys, a local computer virus removal expert.  If you care about your files, don’t start messing around!