Troublesome PC - advice needed

HaloUK

HaloUK

HaloUK

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Hi All, Dads pc has still got issues. The motherboard is an Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe.

A few months ago Dad got conned by the fake Microsoft call and fell for it. Not only did he end up handing over money he also let them install god knows what onto his PC. I took the PC home and formatted the hard drive and reinstalled Windows 10 again.

The problem is the PC keeps turning itself on at random times. Also it keeps coming up when scanned with around 3-5 tracking cookies.

After formatting the HD is it still possible there is spyware left on the PC?

Why is the PC keep turning itself on?
 
Pc turning on happened to me. Was a issue with the lan adapter. Basically there is a setting that allows wake from lan which can be disabled. There are other things that do it as well. Like windows update etc.
I cant see how anything can remain after a format and thats certainly not your starting on its own issue.
 
Yes, he has a external backup drive. Also has a small 60gb SSD acting as a cache drive for the mechanical 2tb HDD (system drive). I also formatted the SSD.

Sorry, just re-read. I don't think anything was backed up to the back up drive. He said that was turned off when the scammers gained access.
 
My PC started turning on when my wife turns on her laptop. I moved my PC to another power socket not shared with the laptop and it stopped doing it!

A format will wipe off dodgy spyware. There will always be tracking cookies on your PC this isnt something necessarily bad. Just annoying. Thats why they passed that law where all websites now have to put that option up to say this website uses tracking cookies and you can click on ok/yes to accept or no to avoid.
 
HaloUK said:
After formatting the HD is it still possible there is spyware left on the PC?
Click to expand...

I would say you would be fine using Windows to format the hard drive and any trace of spyware would be gone, but data could still be recovered if it was needed using this method.
To be on the safe side I would preform a low level format or nuke it writing zero's for a complete erase so nothing could be recovered.
 
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