How to fix Mom's computer

"True story: my mother-in-law heard a Barenaked Ladies song on the radio that she liked, so she Googled 'bare naked ladies.' There was more porn than music in the search results. She clicked around.

'Suddenly this weird web search bar showed up in my browser,' she told me. 'And after that, I couldn't use the computer at all. Any time I went to it, the disk drive made lots of noise and the whole computer was so slow, I couldn't get it to do anything.'"

here's a laundry list of steps I took to get Mom's computer working and secured from evil software.

found at attuseesall