MalwareBytes Anti-Malware…

As you can tell, I’ve been on an anti-virus and anti-malware kick recently. This is mostly due to the fact that I’ve seen a flare up in the amount of people having issues with it.

As a result, I’m going to share another tool that I’ve used to clean up computers: MalwareBytes Anti-Malware (aka MBAM). It is a simple program that will help your computer get back on the road to recovery.

Install it

First of all, click here to download MBAM. Once you have it downloaded, install away. It should be pretty straight-forward. As you finish installing, it updates to the latest version and then leads straight to the scanning page.

As you can see, there are two modes. Quick scan searches for the most common issues and will catch most of the big stuff. This is recommended if you scan on a regular basis and haven’t been having any issues with your computer.

If you have had issues or you’ve never scanned for viruses, you may want to do the full scan to be sure everything is checked out. The full scan is going to take significantly longer than the quick scan, obviously.

After the scan is complete, you have two options:

1. If you had no malware detected, you are home free and can go on with your life.
2. If you had some malware, I would recommend looking through the list and making sure there wasn’t anything in there that you may need later such as your favorite mp3 album or a picture of your mother. Getting the wrong files like this is rare, but worth quickly checking out since getting rid of the wrong file could be a terrible thing. Typing the

I performed a full scan which took just under one hour and scannned 300,000 objects. A quick scan took just under 3 minutes and scanned around 100,000 objects, so you can see there is a significant difference. Of course the actual amount of time to perform the scan will vary based on how many objects there are to scan on your computer.

Once scanning has completed, you are prompted to remove the offending files. You can do this after you’ve checked them out as mentioned above.

Other stuff

Most of the other tabs in MBAM are easily ignored and don’t provide much additional value. One item that might help though is on the More Tools tab and it is the FileASSASSIN tool.

FileASSASSIN allows you to remove otherwise undeleteable files. Occasionally when attempting to delete a file, you will get a dialog that says something to the effect of “Windows is unable to delete the file as it is being used by a separate process.” If you are sure you want to delete it, you can use FileASSASSIN to remove it.

If you ALREADY have an infection and cannot download or run MBAM, remember that you may need to press the F8 key repeatedly before Windows start up so you can go into Safe Mode with Networking, allowing Windows to boot without loading the malware.

Any other programs you use that I should check out for preventing malware, spyware, or viruses? Had any issues using programs like this?

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