My Mom's laptop had the hard drive crap out (our theory that our brother broke it, it was only a few months old), and so I had replaced it (my other brother payed for the new one). Since the OS was an OEM, I had to go get another. I choose to pirate Windows 7 (I'm using it right now XD) and I got a uncracked clean ISO (from the old digital river ISOs that used to distributed freely) and I installed that and got all the drivers all working and it was all good, just needed to authenticate Windows. Now I don't have a key (the OEM OS was Windows 8), so I decided to use a crack. Downloaded it, installed, and it had adware. It was only running for a few hours and malware already! So, instead of trying to get rid of it, I just started over again, but it still took forever more to do. The next time I spent plenty of time making sure the crack was clean before I used, and found a clean one, but so much time still down the drain.

Fortunately, I haven't had a virus on my own PC, but in my days as tech support in college, the worst I have seen was a Trojan that infected just about every exe on one of the PCs. The plus side of working for the University on their PCs was that instead of trying to save that PC by removing the viruses and attempting to save the OS, we disconnected it from the network and just formatted it and re-imaged the PC using the University enterprise OS image.

I only remember explicitly encountering a virus once when I was younger and had my first computer. I was playing Runescape and someone was seemingly trying to hack my account using a Trojan Horse as I got a warning about it every time I was trying to load the game. Never understood why as my account wasn't really that impressive. I'm still not entirely sure what caused it but I think it was because of a loophole in the version of Java I was using as I hadn't really downloaded anything (could also have something to do with the fact that I was using IE at the time).

So me knowing nothing about how to handle it and my mom knowing nothing about computers, I just stopped going on the website as my computer worked fine otherwise. I ended up going on it a few months later after updating my java and everything was fine and seemingly back to normal. I assume the panda antivirus I had installed prevented it from ever actually being able to do anything.

That's probably the only bad example I can think of. Otherwise I've also encountered different types of malware (though nothing really too severe), when trying to find and downloading various programs through sites like cnet. Most commonly the kind that hijacks your browser and changes your homepage and default search engine. The last time I did (which I think was something like 1 and a half year ago) I'm pretty sure I got it because I was trying to find some software when doing a school project and it must've come bundled without me realizing. I actually went quite a long time without doing anything about it, as I just simply stopped using the browser it affected. Until one day I eventually installed adwcleaner and used that to get rid of it.

I think considering just how inexperienced I was and how little I knew about computers and dealing with viruses back in the day I've still been pretty lucky in not encountering anything too severe (especially considering I haven't really been paying for good antivirus software either). I'm definitely not an expert or anything now either but I'd like to think I have enough experience to know what to avoid.

I do not know which virus I caught earlier this year, but it slowed down my computer to a crawl. It ate up pretty much all my processor whenever I turned it on and I could not do anything without waiting for 5 minutes. Fortunately I was able to get rid of it.

Back when I was in high school, my computer got a virus from Bulbapedia of all places... For the longest time, I avoided the site and stuck with serebii to ensure I wouldn't get another virus. I told someone the story and they were shocked and skeptical because that had never happened to them. A couple of years ago, I got on the site again since other people said it never happened to them. Whatever virus was there before is no there anymore. I still use serebii for pokemon info though.

The worse virus I have ever dealt with was that Ransomware virus back in mid-2013, I just started playing Minecraft again and I wanted to try out some mods and somewhere (I don't remember where exactly), I got the virus, I literally freaked out until I fixed it.

If any of you don't know what Ransomware is, it's a virus where it shuts down your computer and a fake FBI page shows up saying that you have commented a bunch of federal crimes and demands you to pay a fee of like $500 for those crimes, after researching it on another device, it was all fake. So, what I did was is hard resetting the computer and start up on Safe Mode and installed AVG Antivirus and it eliminated that virus, since then, I have used AVG. Any files I have download and every 12 hours, my antivirus scans for virus so it doesn't happen again.

I had gotten the Rabbit Virus which opens hundreds of cmds until the computer crashes. Couldn't repair until I bought a Windows Repair DVD.

I have never really encountered a virus, but I think the worst virus would be a virus that holds your computer hostage until money is paid (in other words, ransomware).

Using computers for 10 years (Starting at the age of 5), my Dad hated me using his computer since I always seem to bump into unfortunate websites especially when to download games or even play flash games, luckily through all the years with the inclusion of multiple formats, I have gone better at noticing and removing viruses.

Recently I only bumped into multiple malwares or other types that only change your browser and forces you to use their search engine, or be completely ironic like being an ad blocker but it provides more adverts than the websites should do. Though I did bump into 2 bad viruses, one was the FBI ransomware IgorBird122 mentioned, which told me that I was illegal activities on the Internet and I will have to pay a bill otherwise they would lock up the laptop. Normally the ransomware would lock the laptop up, so you can't do pretty much anything, but the virus didn't do that for me. I was able to quickly research it and completely remove it.

Another virus that I bumped into, I was on my Dad's laptop, it must've installed itself before I started going on it, I don't even know the name. It completely locked up the computer. When the OS starts, the OS glitches all over the place, it couldn't be used. It kept deleting certain programs and it was quite destructive. Soon enough my Dad once again for about the hundredth time formatted the system.

The worst virus I've ever encountered happened about 2 months ago, I think. I was trying to run a scan on Malwarebytes but pop-ups kept opening up nonstop and I had to use my precise mouse-moving and clicking skills to hit the start scan button and wait. It was terrible. :c

Although technically this is Spyware, it's a very severe strain of it ("strain"...am I talking about a plague here?).

It's known as NinjaLoader, and I got it about half a year ago after a normally trusted download got derailed, and I tried to nab it. Luckily, I took notice almost immediately that something was up, so not much was damaged. I did lose a ton of time taking it out, though. It's a very persistent Spyware that required multiple softwares to remove (MalwareBytes, Comodo, and CCleaner).

What NinjaLoader does is essentially rapid-fire the installation of many scammy, energy-guzzling processes that automatically open against your will and slow even the best of computers to a crawl if left unchecked by hogging up the RAM, if I recall the details of it correctly.

The worst virus I ever encountered happening about 5 or 6 months ago. It happened when I downloaded Windows 10 on my laptop from an email. Turns out that I shouldn't have downloaded it from there as it messed up my computer pretty bad. My mouse would freeze every 30 seconds and whenever I opened up a word document it would close. I had to reset my laptop to factory settings and I am back to Windows 8.1. Every so often, I still get notifications on my laptop asking me to upgrade to Windows 10, but I won't do it as it will give me another virus. If I can somehow get Windows 10 for free from an authorized place, I will upgrade.