Great comprehensive list! I had a limited number of these, but now I’ve got all the big names.

Thanks for this. I had several of these tools, but almost never have the one that I need and have to go looking for it. Great to have the list all in one place.

For any professional technician the first virus removal tool should be a manual approach. Every one of the programs listed above will only identify infections at a less than 100% success rate. Anti-virus apps. are end-user software that is designed primarily as a defensive guard, it should never be considered a repair tool especially for those who claim to be professional repair technicians. Once a system is infected you need to adopt an offensive & forensic approach to the removal.

Thank you very much for this extensive list. I had the avg, norton, and mcafee removal tools previously shown in the repair tools section. Now I have the tools to remove anti-virus programs that I’ve not encountered in the field before.

BTW, forgot to mention that Opswat AppRemover is freeware.

Avast is what I prefer, although for end users who aren’t very PC literate and just want to hit a “Heal” button, I recommend AVG. It uses more resources in CPU, RAM and HD, but AVG 8.5 is a vast improvement over AVG 8.0, but it’s still not as lean as AVG 7.5 was.

Sevenships8, The Avira tool RegCleaner will only find and remove keys that belong to Aviras products. It isnt an overall “Registry Cleaner”.

You might try Doctor Web not bloated like the bigger ones and does anyone have a good antivirus that you can run from a lockable jumpdrive, Doctor Web 4.44 does?

Great list. Best in the business.

Great list. Just used it on a clients machine. Thanks!

It amazes me how all you guys depend on or try and use these anti-virus tools and then tell your client the computer is fixed. I for one have found many of these tools are not that effective against many of the nasty viruses that are out there. If you spend 2 hours trying to remove viruses then why dont you just wipe, re-format and re-load? It is guaranteed to fix everything including registry errors. You have a clean slate, and the machine runs like new.

So you spend 2 hours trying to rid the machine of viruses only to find out it has more than one and it still runs like crap. Now you have decided to wipe the drive. Now you are going to spend a few more hours at it when you should have just wiped it to begin with. I dont waste my time.

A good experienced technican can usually backup, wipe, and re-load in about 2.5 hours. This includes running hard drive diagnostics which you should also be doing. You also better be maintaining a driver database on your external USB drive.

Also, a good experienced tech does not just work on customer machines, when times are slow. You should be refurbishing computers for re-sale… so you should be working for yourself. I always purchase or acquire computer lots from recyclers or from my own recycle pickups. I always have tons of machines that need work and I work on several machines at a time, not just one. So you want to get good at? Get off your butt.

Jay,

Good on you! You are correct, it takes longer than 2.5 hours especially when you consider after the O.S. install, mobo drivers & video card drivers, the time it takes to reinstall client’s software e.g. Internet Security, Office, printer drivers, configure their email a/c plus scan the backup of client’s data before restoring it to the computer.

Many clients I see do not have their recovery disc or an XP/Vista disc and mobo drivers disc.

I use format/reinstall option as the last resort & I rarely have had to resort to it. I consider it a cop-out to just format/reinstall on every infected computer.

I work on multiple computers when in my workshop but some clients prefer to have the work done at their premises. If it looks like it might be a long job disinfecting, I advise the client that it will be cheaper if I take it to my workshop – all clients have agreed to that.

Jeff

Norton AntiVirus 2003 or earlier:
http://service1.symantec.com/support/sunset-c2002kb.nsf/0/73bf2b6c4e168da785256edd00478da6?opendocument

The download link for F-Secure’s uninstaller is not working. I did find this uninstaller for their home products though:

http://www.f-secure.com/kb/6640

Scott & Jay,

I too have to weigh the options of whether to disinfect or reinstall. I always give the client the option to choose – indicating that we can only guaranty there computer will be infection free if we re-install a clean copy of the system. However, i always try to restore the FACTORY IMAGE from the recovery partition (if there is one) if possible because it takes a lot less time than re-installing from an ms oem or manufacture supplied discs and having to manually install drivers as well.

I always ask. If they prefer to have me disinfect because they may have installed apps they don’t have the install discs for and/or they have data they have not backed up… then i will disinfect but i will give them the disclaimer that we can not guaranty that it is infection free, just that we have removed all that we could find.

Either way, our disclaimer also states that whether we install a clean system or disinfect, we cannot guaranty that the system will not get reinfected due to the clients downloading, email and surfing habits.

I had this one client recently that serviced four times by reinstalling her system. Two days after each service, she would call me to say that her system was messed up again. After concluding that she was either being systematically attacked from the outside or she was messing up her system herself (either way not my problem) I finally had to cut her off and told her that i would have to bill her if she called again and wanted me to repair her system.