max # of spyware found on a computer
 

For the techies out there, what's the largest number of pieces of spyware that you have removed from a computer?

My uncle currently holds my record at just over 13,000 pieces. Removed using spybot and then a bit of manual registry tinkering

My brother virus record

55 Viruses on his machine at once all different trojans

Dads pc for spyware

12,000 files picked up with spy sweeper

Anything over 400 and I just reformat as it will be virtually impossible to get rid of with 100% assurance.

I repair PC's and Laptops for a living and the worst I've seen to date is a customers PC ( He had Limewire, which is just plain EVIL) with 43,000+ infected files as seen by AVG.

In the future , I'll take a screen shot if I can of massively infected PC's I get in my shop for ya.

Here's a pic of a PC that came in and the customer complained the fans were loud, oh and it was also infected with 23 virus's and he had NO anti-virus program :banghead:

LoL. I do the same thing for a free time job and I have experienced similar situations, though not that many viruses. I had an older woman drop off her pc saying it wasn't working right. Of course she didn't have any anti-virus programs, basically nothing on the pc. It turns out she had about 3,000 viruses amassed from the last 4 or 5 years. The internals were of course coated in a thick blanket of dust. In fact I'm not really sure how the computer even worked. I wish I would have taken pics.

The problem I have with such large estimates is that Spybot and Ad-aware both pick up Tracking Cookies, and add them to the total. This could artificially inflate the total.

I'd believe 3K Viruses/Trojans on an unpatched machine. I've seen totals in the 500 range, and at that point I'd rather do an OS reinstall rather than extricate each virus.

Used to work in the University tech department and would see 3k daily. Highest was 11k. I just hated when a system would come back infested again because the kid couldn't stay away from the pron sites.

Dang, I wouldn't want that to happen to my PC lol

Back when I was working at a computer shop a guy brought in his machine and it had over 100,000 instances of spyware/trojans/viruses. Literally more than half of his machine was viruses. The best part was when he asked if we could recover his machine without having to reformat. We told the guy to go easy on all of the porn sites. He of course denied ever visiting them....

That one is pretty bad, but we've had a machine come if before that was infested with roaches. We bagged it up in a trash bag and returned it to the person because we refused to work on something that disgusting.