Software Review and Free Download | Security Solutions | avast! Virus Cleaner

» Review avast! Virus Cleaner
(October 2006)

avast! Virus Cleaner is available free for every user. This tool will help you remove selected worm infections from your computer.

Free virus & worm removal tool :If, despite all the security measures you take, your computer gets infected by a virus or worm, it is necessary to disinfect your system somehow. While for some viruses the only 100% realiable method of disinfection is restoring your system from backups, for many common infections this is not really necessary and the virus/worm can be removed quite easily.

Removing the infection :The worms often schedule themselves to be run automatically when you start your operating system; some of them even register themselves to be run when any other application is started. Removing such a worm is not as simple as deleting it - when you just delete the worm file, your operating system might not be able to start your applications (such as Explorer) any more.

So, in order to properly remove the worm from your computer, it is often necessary to make additional fixes in your system registry, delete the links from your Startup Folder etc. Here the avast! Virus Cleaner comes - it will find and remove selected worms from your computer, as well as fix the registry and startup items to make sure your system will work correctly after the disinfection.

Many worms - when activated - create additional working files on your hard disk. Even though these files alone are harmless, they are useless and they should not be there. When avast! Virus Cleaner detects and removes a known worm from your computer, its working/temporary files are removed as well. The same applies for worm-specific registry entries etc.
Disinfection process in detail: By default, avast! Virus Cleaner does all the work automatically. When you start it and press the "Start scanning" button, the following will be done:

1.The operating system memory will be scanned, and if any known worm is found, the worm process is terminated - thus avoiding further spreading. If it is not possible to terminate the worm process (it could happen e.g. with Nimda worm that uses a fake library to run inside other processes), the worm will be deactivated in memory to stop its spreading.

2.Your local hard disks will be scanned.

3.The "startup items" (such as the system registry, Startup Folder(s), etc.) will be scanned. References to worms found in memory or on disk will be removed or fixed.

4.Infected files, identified in point 2, will be removed or fixed (as needed).
 

5.Additional working/temporary files created by the identified worms will be removed.

6.If restarting the computer is needed to finish the disinfection process (e.g. when a file could not be removed because it was currently in use, or if the deactivated worm process is still present), the user is notified and asked whether the restart should be done immediately.
For experienced users, various command-line arguments can be used to customize the program behavior. The list of command-line arguments will be displayed when started with /? parameter. Note: the command-line arguments are intended for experienced users only! Changing the default parameters may result in incomplete disinfection that may render your operating system nonfunctional, as noted above.

size: 16.3 MB
Download avast! Virus Cleaner

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