Manual file work?

[AtomShards]

Hello, i am new to most of the hardcore tech stuff such as programming and hacking but i'm not the guy who doesn't know what the windows key is if you catch my drift. I've been working at a PC repair store and we often use programs to remove viruses, spyware etc but when a virus wont simply go away with those programs "the boss" works overnight and does it manually. I want to learn how to sift through files and have to knowledge on how to spot what not supposed to be there and how to safely dispose of those files. I also made a post on removing Windows 10 passwords and someone mentioned that the passwords are stored on the pc, how would i find things like that too. All help is greatly appreciated. Thank you :D

[IDNeon]

He's probably finding walkthroughs for the specific virus that usually tells you which regkeys and files belong to that virus and just manually removes them.

Windows Passwords are (off the top of my head) stored in a file as cyphertext, not plain text, you would have to be able to decrypt the file to examine the password.  There's easier methods to breech passwords if you have access to the machine such as "Windows NT Offline Registry Editor" which will allow you to just remove a password associated with an account so you can reset it to something you know.

Being a PC repair, I would think things like "Registry Editor" and some other goods like HiRens might be quite useful.

[Dave-ee Jones]

HBCD (Hiren's Boot CD) is a good place to start. It's basically a pocket knife (or swiss army knife, for those Europeans) for Windows machines. It even has a little bootable Windows XP on it with tools that allow you to remove Administrator passwords (edits SAM files), create user accounts, delete user accounts etc. etc.

Pretty handy.

I carry around a multiboot USB with HBCD, a few Linux distros (Kali and Debian, mainly) which help to read Windows filesystems that you couldn't read on a Windows machine because of permission problems (hate 'em).

In terms of learning what's normal and what's not, knowing what Windows uses to get around, knowing what programs are known to cause problems, knowing what AVs are actually useful and what programs can be useful. If you know what software to use to find out information about computers you generally won't need much know-how around Windows machines, you just put that bit of software on the PC and let it do it's thing and sort itself out.

E.g. simple things like Ninite to install multiple programs at once, very easily and without ads/toolbars etc. 

It's the little things..