I know there are a few fellow techs roaming these boards. Anyone feel like posting their toolkit of their most-used (or just accumulated) apps for fixing those nasty problems? When I first started my job as a tech (thank god no longer doing that), I spent a few days trying to find out some common tools, but didn't get any real hits. Figured I might share my toolkit with others looking for this kind of information.
My old job had us using Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and SuperAntiSpyware as the two programs for malware removal. Everything else I accumulated over time to help with various issues.
Over the period of a few years, I ended up shoving all this onto a 16GB flash drive.
For 90% of problems, these generally were enough.
- MalwareBytes Anti-Malware - Malware removal tool
- SuperantiSpyware - malware removal tool
- ATF-Cleaner - "All the Files" cleaner deletes a lot of useless temp files, etc.
- Trend Micro HiJack This Runs through the registry and lets you disable startup entries and more.
- SysInternals Autoruns Runs through the registry and lets you disable startup entries and more.
- RKill - Kills running processes, helpful for stopping a lot of rogue malware from running while you're working
- Combofix A sort of nuclear smart-bomb for a lot of weird problems, notably with rootkits.
- Unhide (recursive hidden attribute changer)
If I ran into rootkits (which happened rather frequently by the end of my time there)
- TDSS Killer - Detects and removes a lot of rootkits.
- aswMBR - Detects and removes a lot of rootkits
- GMER - Rootkit detection and removal tool.
I often ran into a lot of odd problems which resulted in me building a small collection of diag-tools, etc.
I also kept a compressed folder full of a bunch of "clean" files that I saw were attacked regularly (pulled from known working machines and added as needed) as well as
registry fixes for many file types (some malware would hijack .exe extensions).
I'd occaionsally need to run benchmarking on hardware as well, or run a stress test. For those:
I have a separate disk with
Memtest for running memory.
I also kept a directory full of removal tools for every anti-virus program I've run across. McAfee, Norton, AVG, Bitdefender, Kaspersky, Panda, Trend Micro, Microsoft Security Essentials, Zone Alarm, and a few others. You can usually find these by typing in the anti-virus name and "removal tool." ESet carries a nice list of them.
ESet list of Removal Tools for common A\V programs
I think perhaps one of the more interesting removal tools I've run across is the
"Dot Net Framework" cleanup tool. Not officially supported by Microsoft, but it has helped tremendously in fixing dot-net framework update issues on every version of Windows I've had to work on. It strips out the entire dot-net framework, and you just reinstall as normal.
On top of that, I keep the
Service Packs for every version of Windows since XP as well. I thought about offloading those onto a CD, but never bothered.
I'm sure there are tons of other bits I'm missing that I probably only used once and disposed of, or are buried ten folders deep on my flash-drive. But that's the bulk of it. Anyone have something to add? Alternatives? Tales of Caution?