Rising PC Doctor

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Rising_PC_Doctor_d6127.html

It's on today's front page (June 30 2009). In the days to come I'll be checking it out, and I'll be posting any info here in this thread. As many of you regulars may already know, I have constant contact with infected and otherwise screwed up PCs and it's a perfect test platform for apps like this. Hopefully, this app from Rising is MUCH better than their dreadful anti-virus application (my "review" of it can be found here). If anyone else has any comments and/or thoughts and/or experiences with this new Rising PC Doctor, feel free to add to this thread.

:-D

[dlb]

 

I look forward to the DLB Report

:cool

 

I haven't much of an oppotunity to use Rising PC Doctor just yet, but in the few cases where I have used it, it refuses to update. I clicked the "Update Now" link in the top right corner, it opens the update window, but then answers with "Update failed". So I checked the "Connection" settings and it was set correctly ("Use same settings as Internet Explorer"). So I tried again, and again the update failed. So I figured I'd open IE and minimize it right away, then try to update with IE running in the background. This worked. It connected and downloaded the update immediately. Strange, but whatever. So, once I get a chance to throw at some really messed up and infected PCs, I'll be able to post some more info about Rising PC Doctor.
:-D

(download link is in my first post above)

One other thing... I'm not a big fan of the general look of this program. It's too "cutesy". It looks like it was designed by/for young children. Don't get me wrong: the GUI is clean and functional and easy to navigate, but the little cartoon animals are too much for a serious app. This thing is supposed to kill malware and tune up your PC, not teach basic addition and subtraction to pre-schoolers. Just a pet peeve... sorry for the rant. rolleyes :-o

 

I finally had an opportunity to try Rising PC Doctor on a sufficiently infected PC. I'd been waiting for one that was obviously REALLY infected with some of the more prevelent and common malware that's out there, namely the family of rogue-ware related to AntiVirus2009 and its siblings, cousins, and in-bred mutants, and the Vundo family which spills over in to the previously listed family of nasties also, and a desktop hijack (sysguard). The PC being scanned was actually so infected that a scan couldn't even be initiated until I booted to PE and manually deleted some of the more intrusive malware. So, I'm at the desktop, I installed PCdoc and updated it. I ran every type of scan available: the quick or "system core" scan, custom "user defined" scans, and I used both the Trojan scan and the Spyware scan. If there was any doubt that this is just as ineffective as Rising's antivirus offering, let there be no more doubt. PC Doctor found absolutely NOTHING in any of the scans. So as a malware removal tool, it is worthless IMO. However, it does have some other features that I haven't spent much time with but look good. These features are available in many, many other freeware apps, but that's OK. These other features are the redeeming quality that prevents me from completely hating PC Doctor. There's a process manager, services manager, file shredder, startup controller, and some other stuff, and these features seem to be quite functional and complete in what they pick up and display; I've had other process managers in the past that basically regurgitate the Windows task manager, and from I can tell after some quick use, the PC Doctor process manager is a bit more thorough in displaying running processes than the Windows task manager. So, all said and done, I'll give PC Doctor's malware abilities ZERO stars. I'll give the rest of it 3.5 stars, actually I'll subtract a half-star for the lame cutesy cartoon animals all over the GUI for 3 stars total.

BTW- I did run scans with MBAM (37 items found and removed) and SuperAntispyware (ran before MBAM with 91 items found and removed).

[dlb]

 

Thanks for the comprehensive report , dlb.

BTW I find that you often have to perform scans recursively, as each scan uncovers more stuff. Often you will find more if you can get at the cloaking agent (sounds like Star Trek) with combofix or the like. This was what was probably hiding stuff from the 'Doctor'.

 

I generally run ComboFix last after running full scans with MBAM, SAS, and Avira's AntiVir or AVG or A-Squared. Sometimes I throw RemoveIT Pro into the mix, but it usually is towards the end also as it tends to have more false positives than other scanners, but it's great at finding stuff that may have otherwise 'slipped through the cracks'.