Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Offline Virus Scans

I've been using a program called YUMI to run AVG virus scans from a thumb drive. It works fine most of the time, but I can't seem to make it work on a computer with a UEFI BIOS; they've been around for a few years now, but so far I've only worked on three or four, and have had poor luck booting any of them from a thumb drive.

While I'm sure I could overcome this obstacle if I really put my mind to it, there's no need... Microsoft to the rescue! (and you KNOW how much I hate saying anything good about Microsoft.) There's a web page out there where you can download a program that will create a bootable thumb drive, one that even works with UEFI BIOS PCs, open a Windows PE environment, and run a Windows Defender scan. Since it's a Windows PE boot, none of the files on your hard drive are protected as 'in use', and can be repaired or deleted if they are found to be infected.

Here's the page:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17466/windows-defender-offline-help-protect-my-pc
Here, you can download Windows Defender Offline:The links are at the bottom of the page; choose 32- or 64-bit as appropriate. Once the download completes, plug in a blank thumb drive, then double-click  mssstool32.exe  or  mssstool64.exe  in your Downloads folder; from here on, it's pretty much self-explanatory... you should be able to boot the computer from the thumb drive and scan the PC.
How's that for short and sweet?

No comments: