clean install windows 8 on computer which came with it preinstalled?

apologies in advance if this is the wrong subforum to be posting this in; i mostly just need advice

i bought a notebook a few months go that came preinstalled with windows 8; works fine everything is fine--but a few days ago i had some things happen that made me suspect there might be a keylogger in my system

all my scans are coming up clean, and just using the computer everything looks completely fine, but i've become insanely paranoid and obsessed with the possibility that there might be a little guy hiding out in there tracking everything i do

it seems to me like the only 100% safe thing to do is clean install windows to ensure anything that might be in there gets completely wiped out

what is the best/safest way to go about doing this? of course the laptop didn't come with any kind of recovery disk, and i was an idiot to not make one when i first got it. restore factory settings uses the recovery partition, right? which could possibly be infected? do i just have to re-buy windows? if i do, can i just buy the win8 pro-upgrade instead of the system builder and still do a full wipe/clean install? i'm getting conflicting info from different sources

thanks so much for your help!

 

I've never heard of a recovery partition being infected. It is a separate partition and is usually unavailable to the OS during runtime. If it is available, the contents are usually packaged and unreadable by traditional means.

 

i have no idea if this guy knows what he's talking about but

http://ask-leo.com/can_a_recovery_partition_be_infected.html

??

 

Guess you will have to choose a side

 

def seems possible, just way unlikely

unfortunately this entire scenario, including my having a virus at all, is pretty "unlikely" but that isn't stopping me from panicking about it

i guess i'm wondering what you all, people who presumably are much better with computers than i am, would do in this situation

 

Has ANYTHING happened to make you suspicious?

 

kind of? i'm actually not even sure anymore

basically i was getting weird emails from amazon about stuff being put in my cart that i'd never put there or even looked at on amazon; i'd go to check and my cart would be empty

this made me start digging around in my emails and at first i concluded the email was spam but now it seems like it's legit? i guess my original line of thought was i had clicked through a spam email thinking it was real, picked up a virus going through the link, and gotten something, maybe a keylogger, maybe something else, that was giving someone access to my amazon cart (i only ever use my personal laptop so no other "left it logged in somewhere" explanations)

even if the emails were real/not spam, seems like someone was putting stuff in my cart, right? are there any other explanations for that? (i chatted with an amazon person briefly, who said they had no record of the email being sent to me, but who knows how serious they are about these kind of questions)

haven't done the super-extensive scans you guys recommend yet but mbam/windows defender/spybot are all coming up clean

so i still don't know if the emails were real or not, but either way makes me nervous--am i just being way too paranoid? but it seems like if all my personal/bank info could be at risk, there's not really any reason to take chances

tl;dr i'm insane but advice is appreciated anyway

 

okay after talking to a few people it seems the amazon emails were from a legit amazon address--when i searched it i found a few odd blog posts who called it out as spam, but seems people have been getting legit messages from it

um sorry again if this is the completely wrong place to be asking about this but what does that mean, in terms of what i should be doing/worried about

 

To be safe, change your amazon password.

 

haha, so done

changed it a couple times as well as um every other important password i have

is that all ?? am i panicking about invisible drive-by downloads for no reason :-o

 

I haven't heard anything that leads me to think that your machine is infected. However, I would have cause for concern about your passwords. I think that if you change them (email too), that you will probably be in good shape.

 

i changed my amazon/email/bank/paypal passwords, all on a different laptop from this one

 

It's also important to use STRONG passwords. Strong passwords include things like:

A minimum of 8 characters.
No personal info (i.e. your birthday, your name, etc.)
No words that can be found in a dictionary
At least 1 or more of the following: Capital letters, special characters (not all websites allow special characters in passwords), numbers