Windows XP anti-virus

[Francis Asis]

Suddenly today XP anti-virus is telling me I have 67 infected files. My NTL anti-virus has not detected anything. I've never even heard of XP anti-virus before and its telling me to register and spend $50 to be disinfected.
Can anyone advise me
Thanks

[peanut]

XP doesn't come with an antivirus. That message sounds like a virus. Is your computer running okay? 67 infected files would make your computer almost useless. The only thing there may be 67 of is maybe cookies. If you run a decent antivirus, run something like ccleaner, spybot, or stinger and they come up with nothing, youre probably fine. A disk cleanup and occasional defrag would not hurt either.

[Francis Asis]

Thank you - that's what I thought but I was worried there for a while.

[ACtheTROLL]

Be worried! - there is a hole in your defense ...
this one luckily gave itself away ... but what else have you got???

if you are lucky just plain adware but if it's spyware ...

you need to add spybot search and destroy
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

and ad-aware
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/products/ad_aware_f ree.php
to your toolkit pretty sharply
(install and use both - today)
and then at least one a week

A virus scanner won't detect malware - just like a malware scanner won't detect viruses... so it's not surprising and not necesarily a criticism of your scanner....

[Francis Asis]

Dear Troll
Thank you for your reply but I'm afraid I don't understand. What is Malware? and have I got a virus or not? And how do I stop this XP anti-virus pop-up?

[ACtheTROLL]

malware .... well it's a general term that includes a virus ... but it's not good for you.

malware an easy way of referring to anything that's not a virus (the boundaries get a little blurred).

keyloggers ... popups ...stupid advertising phishing ... it's all malware.

download all the software - let it update and scan your system.

hopefully that will sort it