Sorry Pooky. But Ain't No One on the Web Gonna Fix Your Pooter; or
How to Avoid Falling Into the Endless Depths of Hell that Is the Fake AV Alert

We have all seen something like the image below popup on our screens while surfing the web, or maybe (hopefully not) after opening up a suspicious email.  The pitch is almost always the same. You must call an 8** number to avoid your feces from hitting our circular oscillator.  THERE IS NO LEGITIMATE COMPUTER COMPANY ANY WHERE IN THE WORLD THAT ENGAGES IN THIS KIND OF BEHAVIOR.  ESPECIALLY, MICROSOFT, DOES NOT DO THIS.  DO NOT CALL. DO NOT CLICK ON THE AD.  Follow the instructions below.

Does this mean your computer has a virus?  Well, it might after this popups.  But more than likely this is an example of rogue web advertising; and therefore nothing you want to touch or click or in any way interact with. So here is how you get it off your screen without touching it.  To accomplish our task, we use Task Manager.  But to bring up Task Manager we will use the keyboard shortcut of:

 CTRL + ALT + DELETE

If this seems foreign to you, imagine you are playing a piano chord.  Hold down the CTRL key and the ALT key with two fingers of your left hand. And then tap DELETE key with your right hand.  Back in the day, when a Blue Screen of Death popped up as often as a pimple, we called this KB shortcut the "3 Finger Salute."  At that time , CTRL + ALT + DEL simply rebooted the PC.  Now in Windows 10 and Windows 11, the 3 Finger Salute brings a much more helpful diagnostic menu, if that's your thing.  The last item on the list is Task Manager.  Click Task Manager.

What is displayed below is Task Manager from Windows 10, with Windows 11 looking pretty much exactly the same.  Windows 11 2022h2 has a slightly different appearing interface, and is a bit more colorful.  In all versions of Windows, Task Manager works to shut down an application the same way.  Here are the steps.

So...If you get a Virus Alert.
Step 1:  Give it a 1 Finger Salute
Step 2:  Give it a 3 Finger Salute
And don't do anything else!

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Measure Twice Cut Once
— Second Frutes, John Florio, (1591)