I really need some help

I was playing touhou when suddenly a white screen came up and I got a message with a lot of unsettling pictures from a government thing saying I had been accused of downloading copywriten oe illegal something. and that I needed x amount of money to unlock my computer. I'm really scaird, I have no idea what to do. the only things I have downloaded are my games, skyp, steam and Hamachi. Can anyone please help me?

Its most probably a virus, id suggest starting your pc on safemode and scanning with antivirus.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/start-computer-safe-mode#start-computer-safe-mode=windows-7 tells you how to go in to safe mode. (not sure if it works, i havent done that in a long time)

Can't help much more since i dont know what kind of virus it is, ive heard about viruses like that though.

I'm pressing f8 like it says but i'm not getting anything telling me that safe mode is on.

Edit: I got safety mode to work i'll see what happens.

Edit:2 whenever I start with safety mode it immediately makes me log off again.

Definitely a virus. Not sure how you managed to get one... this quickly... but yeah, the government wouldn't do that. They'd just break your door down and drag you out, lol.

also, they wouldn't ask you for money. They'd just take it from your bank account, lol.

well my bank account is empty and maybe they don't know where I live? or rather who I am. Umm I took my firewall down so people could connect to me on touhou diablo and the fighting games. That;s probably why this is happening.

Like everyone is saying, that there be a virus. The most interesting kind...sorta like the scam phishing things that say that your computer is infected with a virus and that you need to remove it (when in reality it's going to add it because it doesn't exist.)

Edit: what kind of anti-virus you got on yer computer?

If you're all sure it's a virus then I feel a lot better. But I still need to get it off my computer somehow. I'm getting a new computer soon so if there was a way to whipe EVERYTHING from my computer I have now. files, pics, downloads, ect by doing something to the hardware that would work. I wouldn't miss anything apart from a few kawaii pics.

why bother wiping it if you're not going to use it, lol. If you're still planning on using it though, you'll need some way of booting from the computer through an external device. Do you still have your windows install disk? If not, can you burn one with a dvd burner? Windows will fit in one DVD without any problem. Other options include making a USB flash drive bootable and using that to boot. Once you're able to boot, "reinstall" windows on your normal harddrive and select the option to wipe everything while you're at it. Other options include booting into another OS entirely (windows, linux, etc) and getting a program to just 0 out your harddrive.

As Remi said, if you have your Windows installation disk you can easily just reformat the PC entirely. This gets rid of everything and brings the computer back to its original store condition, it also cans the virus.

i'm not planning on using it but I was going to donate it to a school or something. I don't have the OS disc used on the computer that got infevted but I do have the new one I bought. though i'm worried about using it since I may not be able to get it back. So there's no chanc I can hold a magnet up to my harddrive and whip everything?