Rescue tools are used as the first action to clean infected systems immediately after diagnosing the infectious factor.
Most antivirus product manufacturers have this function built into their products, but some of them offer more specialized tools for repairing damaged files, trying to restore your system to an earlier work point.
Only five of these tools are currently available on the market as freeware. They are AVG Rescue CD, Avira EU-Cleaner,Bitdefender Rescue CD,ESET SysRescue , and Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool.
Researchers from the AV-TEST institute tested all of these tools last year by infecting 53 computers and then running each tool to see if it could clean and restore the system to its previous working state.
Because the test focused on the tool's ability to repair and restore systems, only malicious software that was detected by the five major antivirus software vendors was used.
Paradoxically, even if officially the AV researchers reported that they used detectable malware variants in the tests, some of these tools failed to detect all threats at runtime. Only the Bitdefender tool was able to identify all threats and then remove them from the systems.
Nevertheless, the winner in overall system repair rate, always according to the AV-TEST test, was Kaspersky's removal tool. In these tests Kaspersky detected all malicious programs, failed to remove only one infection, but cleaned all additional (harmless) useless files in all cases, repairing a total of 52 out of the 53 tested systems.
Although the Bitdefender Rescue CD tool discovered and removed all viruses, it left clean only 21 out of the 53 systems, leaving behind many useless files on 32 computers.
Adding all the statistics (see below), the final ranking is Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool with an overall repair rate of 98,7%, followed by Bitdefender Rescue CD with 79,9%, AVG Rescue CD with 78%, Avira EU-Cleaner with 64,8 %, and ESET SysRescυe with 64,2%.
Thus, if you are willing to accept that Kaspersky got it wrong in one of the 53 malware, its free virus removal tool is the winner of this competition. If you are willing to compromise with useless files that will remain on your computer, but you want to be 100% protected from viruses, the Bitdefender Rescue CD is the tool for you.
