Wormbog

I think that one of the big reasons I like Macs so much is because I spend so much of my time working with Windows computers.  I can not think of one Windows computer that I have not had to re-image in the past two years.  I’m sure that there are ways to clean the systems up but I find that I spend so much time trying to figure out what is wrong when a simple reinstall works every time.  Recently we have had several teacher computers that have been infected by spyware or scareware.  If I spend a couple of hours with the computers I am usually able to clean them up enough that they are functional again but within a month the problem always seems to creep up again.  Moving forward I have decided that when a system in infected I will run Spybot (http://www.safer-networking.org) and install Panda Cloud AV (http://www.cloudantivirus.com) to see if they can clean it up.  If they do not work I will image the system.  It simply is not worth the time and aggravation for both the user and myself to try and clean the system.

The other critical piece to this is Symantec Ghost.  The ability to have a clean image of each type of computer and quickly put that image on the infected system makes this path work.  I am hoping to look at some open source imaging products this summer and will write a post when I do that.

Here is a link to a Lifehacker (http://lifehacker.com/5227896/five-best-malware-removal-tools) blog dealing with Windows malware removal.  Several of the products are paid and I hate having to spend money to clean up systems so I would stay away from them.  What solutions do you all have for dealing with infected Windows computers?