Friday, January 4, 2013

Windows DEFENDAH Offline

Is Windows Defendah a Contedah?

Helping one of my co-workers clean up his GF's PC. And have scanned it with Malwarebytes, Trend Micro Housecall... Installed my friend, Windows Security Essentials and removed all the Comcast junkware (which wasn't helping her much)... I thought the PC was clean but security essentials found something and suggested the offline scanner.

Through the rabbit hole I go...

First of all the 'infected' PC wants to burn a disc for the scanner.
Of course that fails. But then I find an MS blog regarding the tool:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/security/archive/2012/09/19/microsoft-s-free-security-tools-windows-defender-offline.aspx

So download and burn on a clean PC...

And this is great. But there are different downloadable EXEs and so... If you are trying to uninfect an X64 machine - you want to create an X64 DVD (download the X64 executeable).

To make a long story short, I found it much much clearer to download the ISO. Then I could burn the appropriate ISO (32 or 64) for the machine in question. The 32 bit CD will not run on an X64 system.
And if your clean pc is a 32 bit wonder, will it burn a 64bit CD?

You would think that 'offline' is not a positive marketing term - but this capability (if it works) makes Microsoft a contendah!