Can I scan and remove Malware on another comuter.

CCSS · Dec 26, 2007

I help a lot of elderly people out with their computer problems and am finding an increasing amount of time is now devoted to removing Malware. The main problem I have is that a lot of the computers are quite old (some are still running 95) or don't have much memory and are as slow as snails. So they can take a huge amount of time to fix.

I was thinking of setting up a dedicated computer to scan the drives of the computers in effort to try and speed up the process. I was thinking of using draws to load the drives into and then scanning the drives.

Can you advise if you think this strategy is likely to work and if so what types of malware it is likely to miss and will require scanning and repairing from the original computer.

Any other advice would also be most welcomed.

Brian

chaslang · Dec 26, 2007

Welcome to Major Geeks!

CCSS said: ↑

I was thinking of setting up a dedicated computer to scan the drives of the computers in effort to try and speed up the process. I was thinking of using draws to load the drives into and then scanning the drives.

Can you advise if you think this strategy is likely to work and if so what types of malware it is likely to miss and will require scanning and repairing from the original computer.
Click to expand...

This procedure will not be as effective at removing all malware as necessary. This is mainly due to the fact that you will not be running their OS, loading their registry, running their processes,....etc. Thus you will mostly like miss many things that will only be seen when their PC is actually run normally.

Also most scanners these days miss many of the latest malware that is around and even when detected, much of it requires manual intervention anyway to get all of it removed. This may be less of an issue on older Win98 OS since many of the new infections don't really care that much about the older OS's and rarely impact them. On the otherside, since Win98 is so old and out of date, many tools used to scan and remove malware do not always fully support Win98 or ME.

As I see it, the method you are proposing would really take longer because:

The time it takes you to actually pickup the PC from the person

remove the harddisks

configure them to properly be a slave to use in your system

put them into your PC

scan them in your PC (which as stated will be incomplete)

take them out of your PC

reconfigure them and put them back into the original PC

only to have to rescan in the original PC to find out what was missed

Well that is just my thoughts on it.

What cleaning procedures and tools are you using on these Windows 98 PCs?
Are you really finding any major issues?

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Can I scan and remove Malware on another comuter.

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chaslang MajorGeeks Admin - Master Malware Expert Staff Member