Malware infection can completely cripple your computer especially if the malware is newer and your installed antivirus product is not able to detect it. You can wait for your installed antivirus to update the virus definitions, but by then the malware would have taken control of your system or would have done serious damage to your files. Instead you can use the free F-Secure Easy Clean tool which uses a cloud based detection, so it is able to detect the latest threats in addition to the most common in-the-wild malware.
F-Secure Easy Clean is a standalone Windows application that can be used to detect for malware infections on your system and repair any damage that they may have caused. The tool scans your computer for infections and removes any that it finds. The scan result displays malware that was detected and action that was performed on it. It is able to remove all kinds of threats in wild including rootkits, malware and trojans. F-Secure Easy Clean works along with your installed antivirus product but is not a replacement for your antivirus software.
You can download it from the F-Secure website. The download is a portable Windows application. You do not need to install anything – just double click on the downloaded file (fseasyclean.exe) and it would run. For F-Secure Easy Clean to work, you must have a working internet connection in your PC because it needs to contact the F-Secure cloud servers. After you have agreed to the license agreement, you are shown the main F-Secure Easy Clean window. To start the scan, all you have to is to click on the Start button.
It is advised to turn off your current antivirus product before starting the scan. Clicking on the Scan button would start the scanning and cleaning process and it may take a long time to finish. It will search your hard disk and other locations for spyware, malware, rootkit and other threats. During the scanning and cleaning, it would ask you to restart the computer in order to finish the cleaning process. You may have to reboot your computer multiple times.
Upon reboot, the F-Secure Easy Clean would start before loading other processes like Explorer.exe and scan your system for malware. It would clean if any infection is found. You have to note that it does not remove all the known malware. It focuses just to the most common viruses, worms and other types of malware in the wild. When the scanning and cleaning process is finished, it would show you the final report. It may or may not detect malware on your PC.
F-Secure Easy Clean is a small free tool that you can use to remove malware from your system. It does not have any options to choose and has a very simple interface. It requires a live internet connection in order to contact their cloud servers for the latest information about known threats. It can scan and clean any found threat quickly in only a few minutes. Although it cannot delete all the known malware, but it is still very useful in combatting with latest and in-the-wild threats. You can download it from http://www.f-secure.com/en/web/labs_global/removal/easy-clean.