Hello helpful people, I'm hoping you can educate me on this topic. Important stuff in bold for TL/DR crowd.
I just built a new PC which I am trying to keep as clean and agile as possible. Foolishly, I overlooked a sketchy download and ended up with a nice big bag of crapware unwanted programs to play with. Yay! From what I can tell, they aren't viruses, just bloatware.
So, I'm in Windows 8.1 only running the built-in Windows Defender at the moment. I know I should probably get proper virus protection, but that's not what I need help with. I am trying to manually find and remove the programs that were added to my computer. Here is what I have done so far:
Go into add/remove programs and uninstall anything new.
Look through program files on hard drive and delete folders of new programs.
Look at the task manager to see what is running, hunt it down, and delete it's files.
My question is, by deleting program files, uninstalling from control panel (where possible, sometimes program tries to block this action), and checking to see if it is running in the task manager, am I successfully cleaning my PC of this junk? Are there bits of it still hiding in secret corners of my hard drive I don't know about?
Thanks for your help.
I just built a new PC which I am trying to keep as clean and agile as possible. Foolishly, I overlooked a sketchy download and ended up with a nice big bag of crapware unwanted programs to play with. Yay! From what I can tell, they aren't viruses, just bloatware.
So, I'm in Windows 8.1 only running the built-in Windows Defender at the moment. I know I should probably get proper virus protection, but that's not what I need help with. I am trying to manually find and remove the programs that were added to my computer. Here is what I have done so far:
Go into add/remove programs and uninstall anything new.
Look through program files on hard drive and delete folders of new programs.
Look at the task manager to see what is running, hunt it down, and delete it's files.
My question is, by deleting program files, uninstalling from control panel (where possible, sometimes program tries to block this action), and checking to see if it is running in the task manager, am I successfully cleaning my PC of this junk? Are there bits of it still hiding in secret corners of my hard drive I don't know about?
Thanks for your help.