New Year's Check Up - Checking For Viruses and Malware!

Welcome back, if you followed my guide last week, you might be enjoying a somewhat less cluttered and faster system, but its time we get rid of any virus trojan or malware that might be affecting your system!.

What is the best antivirus? - http://www.av-comparatives.org/
Often i come across this question, and there are preferences for every one out there, some people love N0rton or Mkaffee,(i dont like them personally) what i like to do is check out an independent organization called AV-Compares, that tests antivirus programs 3-4 times  a year against a pool of old and new viruses a good antivirus that catches every single threat will tax your syetem making it slow and  and a "light" antivirus might not catch all of them. (on last years tests, Avast was granted the best free antivirus due to its speed and ability to catch a high percentage of threats, but there are better (slower) ones, check Av-compares  often for up to date data.



Regardless of what antivirus  you use or dont , you will be surprised at what you can find with a few selected utilities that i have been using for the past years, all free and risk free, they mostly do not run in real time and only scan when you open them and request so, and finally they are certainly not scareware here is a list of what i use for a check ups:

Escan Antivirus Tollkit - Portable Antivirus scanner great sidekick for your current Antivirus!
http://www.escanav.com/
A powerful on demand Antivirus that can detect a lot of common and obscure Malware a few rootkits, and some registry virus related entries, originally created and backed  by various smaller underdog antivirus companies (with Kaspersky as one of them) and, recently renamed to Escan, a great utility to even carry in your usb stick!

To download you will be requested your name and valid email address, if you are paranoid you can input garbage data, the download link will be given in the next screen

Run the program in Administrator mode by right clicking and selecting "run as administrator"

Upon execution the the program will unpack itself to a temp folder, accept the agreement, and will ask to update, when it loads you will be greeted by the main program window, a straightforward procedure click Update and let it run, when you get back to the main program select scan for malware and click scan and clean:

 always make sure your toolkit is up to date,more if you make it portable! then click scan/clean!

 Give it a try you never now what virus/rootkit/malware you will find!, i use this everyday and i find lots of virus/virus entries in computers with antiviruses! it doesnt hurt to check!

PROTIP: When you download and run the program, it  will be extracted to a temporal folder, you can then retrieve it from there and copy to another folder while its running, giving you a portable self updating toolkit to carry around! you can press START and run the "%temp%" command to jump into the system TEMP folder, a folder will contain around 300mb of data, the toolkit program to start it is mwavscan.com

finding the toolkit in the temporary folder, many weird named folders search for one with these files

you can copy all the files inside to another folder, and use that as a portable toolkit! :D

MalwareBytes - Detect and destroy Malware/Rootkits on your system! another great sidekick to have!
http://www.malwarebytes.org/
Another great tool that specializes on searching for common and obscure forms of Malware, this suite is free and many people praise it for its abaility to cure and fix most  malware related problem, give it a download, it will be installed, but will only run when you request it, let it Update and decline the invitation trial for the full version we dont need it for now ( what it does is  run in the back ground when you load windows adding some layer of protection,if you want more protection at the expense of some performance do buy the full version)

 choose a quickscan, for general purposes, you can choose a full scan too, it will take

much longer tough, but make sure all is checked

 PROTIP : you can also convert Malwarebytes into a portable version, head over to where it was installed and copy it over to another folder and or usb stick, it will work as a portable version it is located here  C:\Program Files\Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware  and start it with Mbam.exe (remember to run as administrator)

Finally after Searching your computer for bugs and or rootkits , knowing its clear of threats and trash, its time we give your hard disk a shape up with a good Defragment! stay tuned :D