Hi all, really hope you can help with this. Does anyone know of an efficient and do - able method of ridding my lap top of the virus which infiltrated it a couple of days ago? The virus is called 'Personal Antivirus' and is posing as an anti virus programme - telling me I have Trojan viruses and that I must give over my bank details to cure the Trojan situation.

I've run my McAffe anti virus programme (updated) but nothing has shown up. The PAV virus on my laptop keeps interfering and blocking certain web pages, telling me they are infected - I've only just been able to access this one. Also, I haven't done any work on my laptop since realising, in case the virus contaminates my storage facilities: pen drive and email accounts, and in case I lose the work from my lap top. Any advice would be appreciated.

Virus treatment seems to be a web nightmare, with traps left right and centre, so would very much appreciate your advice.

I'm not very tech savvy - so can't help much Eska. If I think there is a virus on my PC, I back up all my files on a separate drive and then reset my PC to factory settings (which takes ages).

Here's some info. on how to manually remove it:
http://www.2-viruses.com/remove-personal-antivirus

If you can't pull that page up, let me know and I'll cut and paste it all on here.

Spybot is free on the internet - easy to find on "Computeractive" website. Failing that, just find the file and delete it?

Sorry, should have added this seems to be more of a con virus, designed to trick money out of you rather than do any malicious damage.

It may be worth running another anti-virus programme, as not all of them pick up on everything. AVG and Avast! both have versions you can download for free. If you can't access their pages, download the software onto a memory stick using another computer, and then try installing it on your infected machine. Make sure that you don't transmit any viruses to other machines via your memory stick though! If the programme isn't technically a virus, however, but something like a piece of malware, you might like to try something like Ad-Aware (also available for free).

Regular backing up is a good idea anyway, but I'd try to see if you can remove it before having to go down the factory settings route, as that could cause you all manner of other annoyances.

Eska - Take it to your Tech admin crew ... they should sort it in 20 mins. Try not to touch anything registry-wise yourself.