Cleaning up windows hard drives

[g7mjv]

Hi People

l often repair PCs for people.. Usually l end up removing their hard drives, adding them as a slave to my windows machine and then runing various anti-virus and anti-spyware progs to clean them up.

l want to dispense with windows on my home machines but still need to be able to do the above..

Any suggestions please

[twin_57103]

I do a lot of PC repair, too, but don't remove the hard drives (as long as the OS is functional, I just work directly on that machine). Have you tried setting up your utilities under Wine? I wonder if that would work. Otherwise, perhaps a virtual copy of Windows under VMware? The programs needed for this are exclusively Windows utilities because that's where they're needed.

Side question...have you found a good free registry cleaner? The one I use is proprietary, so I have to install it, run it, then remove it. I'd love to have one I can leave on the computer. What I've got in mind is pretty black-box - you click a button, it scans, then recommends x number of changes and you click OK (most of the users of these computers need that level of simplicity).

[Cybergod]

Side question...have you found a good free registry cleaner? The one I use is proprietary, so I have to install it, run it, then remove it. I'd love to have one I can leave on the computer. What I've got in mind is pretty black-box - you click a button, it scans, then recommends x number of changes and you click OK (most of the users of these computers need that level of simplicity).

I also repair PC's and I always install ccleaner on them. It does have a registry cleaner, just check it out and see for yourself.

[twin_57103]

I came across CCleaner a few months back. I haven't used it much, but I'll see about using it on future projects. Thanks!

[UBUSNAFU]

Try http://www.eusing.com/free_registry_...ry_cleaner.htm
It should clean things up for you. It's free and they have the right attitude.

[Cybergod]

Try http://www.eusing.com/free_registry_...ry_cleaner.htm
It should clean things up for you. It's free and they have the right attitude.

What's the right attitude?

[g7mjv]

l also use ccleaner and it certainly seems to do the job

[cybervegan]

I have often used ntfstools to repair borked xp disks (recovers unbootable volumes far better than windows recovery console). I also use clamav to de-louse them - try out the excellent "insert live" cd. On many occasions, I've set up Ubuntu on the machine (multi-boot) and told the user they have that as backup if (when) windows fails again.

You wouldn't be able to easily use wine to run windows clean-up programs on a windows volume under linux, because wine emulates windows - even the C: drive is emulated (i.e. fake - it's just a hidden subdirectory). The registry you'd end up cleaning is the wine one, not the one on the disk you are trying to clean up (wine also emulates this - it's stored in a text file).

To be honest, the only way to be sure you have thoroughly de-loused an infested windows box is to wipe the hard disk and reinstall. Contemporary spy-ware is so polymorphic that it's almost impossible to definitively say you've removed every bit of mal-ware. Of course, the ultimate fix is to get rid of windows entirely and upgrade to a system with proper security and no real problems with malware. I think you know what I mean.

-cybervegan

[Cybergod]

Of course, the ultimate fix is to get rid of windows entirely and upgrade to a system with proper security and no real problems with malware. I think you know what I mean.

-cybervegan

Amen to that