Clean Your Computer With Free Antivirus Rescue CDs
Did you know that many antivirus companies are offering free rescue CDs you can download and use to clean your computer from viruses and spyware? Such CDs are especially useful when you cannot boot your computer due to a virus infection or in some cases the virus cannot be cleaned, because some windows components that are currently running are infected. In other cases malware can prevent antivirus systems from running. Here is a list of some of the popular choices out there.
- Kaspersky - about 100MB and my personal favorite used on the computers at my home: Download Kaspersky Rescue CD. The disk is Linux Kaspersky 2008 engine based and features virus definitions update function, which is very important, so you don’t have to build the rescue cd every time the virus definitions change.
Note: If you own 2009 KAV or KIS you can build such a disk yourself directly from the Kaspersky interface.
- BitDefender – about 228MB. Download BitDefender Rescue CD 2.0 . It is also a linux based solution. Similarly to Kaspersky it offers automatic virus definitions update. Also a very good antivirus. Another nice feature is that the CD includes a memory test (Memtest86+), which is a nice addition.
- VBA32 – abot 75MB. Download VBA32 Rescue Live CD. I recently stumbled across this rescue CD. Linux based and has a text mode interface. The small download size makes it useful and also can update virus signatures from internet.
- Avira AntiVir – about 45MB. Download Avira AntiVir Rescue CD. An excellent antivirus, also linux based rescue CD. Its small size allows very fast boot and download, although it doesn’t support online signatures update. Another nice feature is that it comes as an executable, that burns itself to a CD or writes an .iso image. Avira also offer a free antivirus system to install on your computer.
- F-Secure – about 222MB. Again a Linux based Rescue CD. Donwload F-Secure Rescue CD 3.01. Good antivirus system, but a very large download file. It also features virus signatures update over internet, so you’d only need to download it once.
Hopefully this information will help you the next time your computer gets infected. I would rather try more than one antivirus in such case, instead of relying on just one. All things considered all of the above are very good products, so take your pick.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 12:07 am and is filed under Antivirus, Recovery. Find similar posts by selecting any of the following tags: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on June 19, 2009 at 5:59 pm Laptop is screwed! Need an answer! - TechSpot OpenBoards wrote:
[...] Since you can’t get anything to run and you don’t have any boot cds, the only possible approach to your problem (as i see it) will require you use a friend’s computer to >> Download bootable CD images you can then burn to CD >> Then use that CD to boot up to try to fix your computer As snowchick7669 noted, running an A/V is a good first step. What A/V do you use? As it might be good to see what they offer by way of bootable ‘rescue" CDs. Or see this page. Would recommend trying. Avira. You might also try check first if you can simply do any "online" scan first as well (might work as an online scan with needing to do any program downloads) See this link [...]