Laptop Viruses?

[petmeadow]

My friend gave me her laptop a while back and when I turn it on it tells me that my computer is infected and that it currently has like 13 viruses. I have never been able to use it. I want to download one of the computer sweepers but neither Netscape or Internet Explorer works. So I don't know how I would download anything. I just want to be able to use it. I'm not very computer savy.
Any help?
Thanks in advance.

 

[alyoshka]

The best way to go about it would be to remove the hard disc from this laptop, plug it into a cheap USB enclosure, then plug it into a rig that has a good updated active antivirus in it and run a scan on this drive.
After making a clean pass on this drive you can be mentally sure that this drive is no more infected. You could then plug it back into the laptop and start it up. That should solve a few problems.

Although if systems files were infected earlier , when you start up the rig, you might not be able to boot into windows so you'd need either a windows recovery disc with you or then the windows setup disc.

And in case you already have those on you, then instead of doing all the above said, you could just go in for a fully fresh install from the CD/DVD and run the laptop like it was new again.

 

[alyoshka]

Or you could go over to another computer and just download a one month trial of kaspersky onto a pen drive and come and install it in the laptop straight from the pen drive.
After installation you'd need to activate and update it, so your laptop ought to have a net connection. Once that is done you could easily leave your whole laptop to be scanned and cleaned for viruses, malware , trojans etc etc
And that's it. you'd be free to use it after that.