Help with infected PC

Hi i have just bought from a boot sale a AMD athlon pc with 512mb ddr ram etc 500mb hard drive, i started it up and runs windows xp well but its fill of viruses, spam etc and god knows what else.
I cant reinstall xp as i have not got the cd so need to clean it what procedure and what tools would you use for viruses, malware,trojans etc etc.

Thanks

Steve

Have you considering wiping it and using a linux distro instead? It would be better suited to the older hardware I expect.

Download, update and run Run Malwarebytes' and Hitman Pro, although you may have some infected OS files that can not be removed...

Best of luck.

Not the answer you want to hear but a re-install would definitely be the best way to go - even cleaned up it doesn't sound as though it's going to be a trustworthy machine. Also if it's that full of crud then a fresh install is likely to improve performance somewhat, especially with limited RAM.

Is it a recognised brand? You might be able to get system recovery disks from the original manufacturer.

The other thing to check for is a system recovery partition on the hard drive.

Malware Bytes ...

Once you have it clean (ish) recover the various keys for XP &c, and do a re-install from a borrowed set of disks.

MHC,

"...recover the various keys for XP &c, and do a re-install from a borrowed set of disks."

Could that be done after the cleanup by running SFC.EXE/SCANNOW with any XP installer cd disk in the drive?

If re-install is the plan, is there any point in cleaning it beyond checking for MBR viruses?

If the OP needs to recover keys for XP or anything else then it may be necessary.

I would 2nd MalwareBytes and Hitman Pro

May need to download and run RogueKiller also if any running rogue processes prevent the installation and scans by MalwareBytes/Hitman Pro.