computer viruses

[gav223]

Hi, i'm looking for somebody to give me some advice. I bought a computer about six months ago and since then i've had to take it three times to be re-setup costing 25.00 a time. The fourth time it happened I was told that the motherboard was causing the problem and it needed to be changed. I had it changed and have since not had the same problem. I did not have any virus protection on the computer until a couple of days ago. I installed norman anti virus for free. I then installed morpheus to download some music. Since then my computer has been slowing down and pages have been freezing. I went on to the symantec website and downloaded a few of the virus removal tools. The ones I downloaded were mydoom@mm, beagle@mm, welchia.worm and blaster.worm. None of these found any viruses. I also scanned the hard disk with norman anti virus and that found nothing. This morning when i turned on the computer I had a report from e-anthology stop sign saying that it had found viruses, the most commen being trojan. It's now asking me to pay, so it can cure the viruses. As you can probably tell I havn't got much of an idea when it comes to computers. My questions are:
What is the best anti virus software to get for the money.
Do these free anti virus software work the same way as ones you are paying for.
Can you still use the sites to download music or will the viruses still get through.
Thank you.

 

[gav223]

I bought the computer of a private person which builds them. I haven't got his contact details anymore so I can't do anything about it. the software I downloaded is norman virus control. I dont have a firewall, haven't got a clue what that is. The software told me this morning I had 21 possible spyware viruses but i don't know what that means. I'm not bothered wether it's free or not I just want it to work properly, my way of thinking is, if it's free it's not going to be as good. Will I be able to clean these viruses myself, I don't want to have to pay more money just to reset my comp again. Any chance you could go through step by step exactly what I need to do next.
Cheers.

 

[gav223]

this is obviously not free. Do you want me to download the avg pro single edition, 33 dollars.
How do I get rid of the spyware.

 

[gav223]

cheers, Placebo. installed everything and found 3 viruses.
You say use the spybot and ad-aware to remove the spyware, how do i do that.
Also will it be ok for me to down load music now.

 

[gav223]

Looked through the help topic, typed in spybot and ad-aware and nothing was found.

 

[gav223]

Ive used spykiller and it has picked up 30 SpyWare and AdWare parasites. When I pressed clean it took me to a page to pay, can you confirm that I do have to pay for this or is there another one I can use for free.