About a year ago I tested 13 different antivirus rescue CDs to find for the best to use because I don’t want to waste my time using one that is slow with low detection rate. During that time AVG Rescue CD is not free and it cost a whopping $149.95 for 1 user license with 1 year subscription. I wonder if anyone really purchased it because it is so expensive when there are more than 10 other rescue CD.
AVG has recently changed their shareware Rescue CD into freeware, meaning anyone can use it to scan and clean virus infected machines without owning an AVG license. If you don’t know what is a rescue CD, it is a Live CD mostly used to recover a computer when the system cannot be loaded normally or will not allow normal operation, such as after an extensive or deep-rooted virus infection.
AVG Rescue CD allows you to either install it on a CD with the ISO image file or to USB which uses grub boot loader. To install to USB, you will need to extract all the files into the root of your USB flash drive, and then run makeboot.bat file to make the USB flash drive bootable. Insert the CD or USB to the infected computer and go to BIOS and set the boot priority to CD/USB.
Upon successfully booting up the AVG Rescue CD, it will auto mount the windows partition on the system and then checks for active internet connection. You will be prompted to update the program if an active internet connection is detected. There are 3 options, Online, Office and Download. Online lets you directly download the latest virus definitions and program updates to use only for this time. As for Offline, if you have previously used the Download option, then you can specify where should AVG look for the definition file. Finally, the Download option allows you to download and save the definition to your USB flash drive or computer hard drive for future Offline use.
When you are done updating, go back to the main menu and select the first option Scan. You won’t have a nice graphical user interface on this AVG Rescue CD. During scanning, you will only see a black command prompt screen with a lot of text. To abort the scan, you can press Ctrl+C
AVG Rescue CD contains other utilities such as a Linux File Manager called Midnight Commander, a Registry Editor that allows you to load the Windows registry, Ping to test network connectivity and TestDisk for data recovery. I’ve tested a full scan on a Windows XP partition that contains 20288 files and 2341 folders with 3.58GB in total. It took 14 minutes and 45 seconds to complete scanning which in my humble opinion is quite slow. This is a clean Windows XP without anything on it. If the computer contains a lot of files, it will surely take hours to scan.
In my opinion, the best would be installing AVG Rescue CD on a USB and then use the Download option to store the latest program updates and virus definition on the USB. If you use the bootable CD, you can still plug in your USB flash drive containing the definition and then select Offline which will remount the partitions to allow you to load the files.
AVG might be a bloatware in Windows but when it comes to a Rescue CD, this is no longer a factor to stop us from using it. Lets not forget that AVG Rescue CD used to cost a lot of money before and is now free. You can use it when you want to and it doesn’t need to be installed in Windows.