Comodo Cleaning Essentials

A PC protected by a quality antivirus tool should be pretty darn safe. Even if a brand-new threat isn't recognized, your security tool should keep it from actually doing harm. If the malware has already settled in, though, you have a problem. Active threats may well smack down any attempt to install or run security protection. That's where Comodo Cleaning Essentials (free) comes in. It focuses on cleanup, not ongoing protection, and it does a very good job of clearing out active malware. Not only that, it's free for personal or business use.

Portable Protection
You don't have to worry about malware interfering with installation of Comodo Cleaning Essentials, because it doesn't require installation. Just unzip its folder to the desktop and launch. Better yet, copy it to a USB drive and keep it in your pocket, in case a friend or colleague needs help with malware cleanup. That's what I've done.

Norman Malware Cleaner 2.1 (Free, 3.5 stars) and Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware Free 1.51 (Free, 4 stars) also focus strictly on cleanup. Norman doesn't require installation. Malwarebytes does, but none of my malware samples balked its installer.

At the end of a scan by any of the Norton products there's a link to click if you think some problems remain. This link leads to the Norton Power Eraser (Free, 4 stars) download page. You can also download the tool at will to clean up a persistent threat.

avast! Rescue Disc ($10/once direct, 3.5 stars) takes a different approach. To clean up a badly infested system you boot from the disc, without even launching the installed version of Windows. However, it's a little harder to carry around a CD in your pocket.

The Cleanup Process
After you launch Comodo Cleaning Essentials, it displays a simple main window with three main options: smart scan, full scan, and custom scan. If you're in a situation that needs this product's help, I'd strongly advise the full scan. That's what I did for testing.

There are just a handful of configuration settings, most of which you shouldn't change. If you suspect the possibility of a now-uncommon Master Boot Record (MBR) virus, or if you just want a really thorough scan, you might consider turning on the MBR scanner.

At the beginning of a full scan, the product needs to reboot your system. That lets it launch ahead of any rootkit threats, making it tough for them to hide. Next it runs a full antivirus signature update. Remember, this product isn't installed, so it hasn't had a chance to sit around downloading updates in the background. After updating it performs a thorough scan.

When the scan finishes, it simply reports the number of threats found. You can click for details, if you wish, and even change the action for any or all found threats. By default, it cleans each threat, disinfecting infected files and deleting wholly malicious ones. You can set it to ignore specific files, or to report them to experts at Comodo.

Once the antivirus has finished its cleanup actions, it requests another reboot to confirm that everything's now hunky-dory. Upon reboot it displays a list of all the threats and their Status, either OK or Failed.

On my standard clean test system, the whole process took just under an hour, about twice as long as the current average. You'll normally whip out this tool to solve a serious problem, so the time spent fixing it isn't as important as its success at killing off the active malware.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/WSPFwZut8s8/0,2817,2398834,00.asp

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