Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Ultimate Free Antivirus?

So I've spent all day trying to remove a never-before-seen virus from a small government office computer network. AVG didn't touch it. The virus laughed at AVAST! Clamwin turned tail and ran. So which package removed the nasty virus? Windows Live OneCare Protection Center! That's right, something from Microsoft worked admirably!

Even though the virus didn't have a name and wasn't detected by three different up-to-date scanners, the Windows online scan worked admirably. Although it couldn't identify the virus nor remove it, it did say that a certain file was infected. I booted from my trusty Ultimate Boot CD, went to the file that was pointed out by the Windows Live OneCare Protection Center, deleted it, then replaced it with an empty file with the same name to prevent it being recreated. Voila! Virus-free computer.

Maybe Microsoft ain's so bad, after all. Oh yeah, if the customer were using Linux or OS X, none of this would have been necessary. But then again, if frogs had wings . . .

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