Virus?? On boot i see firefox window briefly even though firefox not installed???

[Patrick_141]

Hey im running windows 10 latest update.
Yesterday i tried to download some program to use a game controller in Bluestacks the android emulator
When i ran the .exe nothing happened except i saw a firefox window in my task bar with a weird title like "wioqwyueuiqwye7yqwe7" or something like that

I just came back from work and my computer was acting a bit wierd (chrome browser closing on its own) so i restarted my PC and when i booted i once again saw the weird firefox window

but the thing is I dont have firefox installed on my PC lol.

what do you guys think, time to reformat again or what

 

[mazboy]

yeah, virus. In the end, you will probably end up wiping the HDD (DO NOT WIPE SSDs) and doing a clean install of Win10. Since others will suggest it, you might as well run your favorite anti-virus and anti-malware program and see what happens.

 

[Patrick_141]

why not wipe ssd?? this is what windows 10 is installed on

 

[mazboy]

"wiping" refers to the process of writing zeros to every sector on the HDD. This is stupid to do to an SSD because SSDs have a finite "write to" life. If you have an SSD as your C:\ boot drive, all you need to do to wipe everything from it is to delete all partitions, repartition and reformat it, and off you go. It is the nature of how the SSD stores the information necessary to retrieve the data stored on it that makes it easy to make that data unrecoverable.

BTW, make sure your SSD isn't more than about 85% full, or you will start getting slow-down issues caused by the drive's own mechanism to spread out the wear in the drive. (yeah, yeah, I know, it's really 90-95% but you can never have too big a drive...or be too skinny)