Most of the security software suites used today provide real time antivirus and anti-malware protection from virus and malware to your PC by keeping a continuous watch on the system. But due to some of their inherent weaknesses, they sometime fail to detect a threat and your system get infected. Sometimes the infection is so severe that it disables your antivirus protection itself and even sometimes you are not is a position to even boot up your system.
In such a case the only option available for you is to use a rescue disk. They are nothing but bootable CD’s, with a skeleton operating system to allow you to boot your system from a external memory device and antivirus and anti-malware software is integrated into it.
In this series of posts, we have already reviewed some of the most useful rescue disks from different security vendors. You can see a list of them at the end of this post.
Microsoft Standalone System Sweeper Beta – Rescue Disk from Microsoft
In this post, we are introducing Microsoft Standalone System Sweeper Beta, a recovery tool that can help you start an infected PC and perform an offline scan to help identify and remove rootkits and other advanced malware.
You can freely download Microsoft Standalone System Sweeper from the Microsoft website at a link given at the end of this post. You just have to choose the option to select the media, CD or USB, on which you want to download this virus cleaning tool. The latest version of the like operating system alongwith the malware removal engine is downloaded onto the media. The malware search and removal engine is same as that used in the freeware Microsoft Security Essentials. You can use this as a portable device and take it to the infected PC to boot from it.
Please remember…Like other rescue disks, Microsoft Standalone System Sweeper is not a replacement for your regular real time security software. It is not designed to function like that. Its use starts where your the use of your regular protection application fails.
Here is a youtube video, which shows the basic features of Microsoft Standalone System Sweeper.
[Download Microsoft Standalone System Sweeper Beta]
