How to remove the isearch.fantastigames.com virus

The isearch.fantastigames.com/465 and isearch.fantastigames.com/439 are browser hijack viruses.  It is easy to remove them but very dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.

You will seriously need to make a backup of your registry file.  And you must be technically competent to restore your computer from your new made backup registry file.

If you are unsure and not completely confident that you can make and restore from a registry backup then DO NOT attempt to do this.  Find someone who can.

If you screw this up, your computer will never work again.  You are warned.

So, that said, these are the steps that I used to remove the isearch.fantastigames.com from my computer.

If you haven’t done so already,  go to your Control Panel and remove the isearch.fantastigame program.

Next, using Win 7 Pro, I clicked “Start” and in the search box typed: regedit
This brought up the “Do you want to allow this program to make changes to your computer?” window.  I clicked “Yes”.  That brought up the Registry Editor.

I had already made a backup of the registry.  So I clicked “Edit” and then “Find” – in the search box I typed “fantasti” with no quotations and then I clicked search.

The result was an opening of one location with a file containing the isearch.fantastigames.com reference.  I made sure that file was highlighted, positioned my cursor over it and “right clicked” on it.  The small window that popped up had an option to “delete” – which I did.

Next, I clicked the “F3” key, which continued the registry search for the next reference to “fantasti”.  Using the the technique described in the previous paragraph, I delete the file containing the isearch.fantastigames.com reference.

I repeated that process approximately 25 to 30 times.  There are at least that many virus insertion points that needed to be deleted.  When no more references to fantasti were found the search button said it could not find anymore references to fantasti.

At that point, the virus was done and gone.  However, the FireFox browser continued to harbor a reference to isearch.fantastigames.com (probably in a cache).  I found it quicker and easier to delete the browser completely and download a new copy to install.

That wrote the final end to isearch.fantastigames.com
Goodbye and good riddance.