Hi all. I recently picked up this virus. TrendMicro detected it but that's all it did. It didn't block it or remove it. What good is detecting it if my antivirus software doesn't take care of it.

I went to a previous restore point and I think I should be good now.

My question is what use is there for an antivirus software to just detect a virus?
Thanks for any replies.

Not a lot, although it's obviously a good thing to know you have a virus, so there's that going for it. I'd look at getting something more robust that will quarantine it as well once it's found.

Download and try Microsoft Security Essentials.

Download and try Windows Defender Offline.

Download and try Malicious Software Removal Tool.

Download and try Malwarebytes.

EDIT: Also try Rootkit Revealer (it may be outdated).

All great suggestions. +1 for those.

Microsofts Security Essentaisls is a monser in the AV world... only matched by paid Kaspersky and Comodo...

as for a 2nd opinion scanner you can do no better then HitMan Pro

its the best at what it does, and with a working internet you cant be more confident after the scan...

Thanks all.

Can anybody recommend a good bootcd based scanner, preferably one that can be loaded from a thumbdrive?

Since I share an IP with probably hundreds of other computers, I'd like to do some offline scans from time to time to make sure that the false positives that some sites give me are false positives.

Something like Kaspersky Rescue Disk? http://support.kaspersky.com/faq/?qid=208282173
There are FAQs on burning and USB use.

Windows Defender Offline that I linked above might satisfy your needs. Haven't tried it personally, though.

Thanks guys, I'm positive I don't have any viruses, but every once in a while doing a full offline check isn't a bad idea just in case.

having a virus every year around christmas. Laying in bed for about 1 week and it's gone. Okay, that's another story.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/

YUMI is a multi os boot solution so you could install a malware, antivirus and various toolkits as a live boot... i think there are some 70 different flavors of OS and utilities you can install...

That's better than e.g. Avira Antivirus, which didn't detect at all the "Security Sphere 2012" trojan that once hijacked certain Windows PC. Malwarebytes was unable to help with that trojan either.

After that I stopped trusting in antivirus programs. I guess they are better than nothing, but that's about it, it seems. I replaced Antivir with MS Security Essentials though. Still considering doing mostly just gaming and goofing around in Windows, and everything else, especially online banking or using of credit card usage online, in Linux.

Come to think of it, the only times I see the damn antivirus programs doing anything is the TrendMicro scanner on one of my PCs blocking me from entering "hazardous" web sites like replacementdocs and anonymous proxy list sites. Oh yeah and it has also quarantined (and corrupted) a bunch of very old DOS game exe files, without asking me first.

Very useful, not.

I've noticed that a lot of the programs won't do simple things like take a checksum of a file and consider it to be the same file that I've already told it was safe a half dozen times before just because it's no longer in the same path.

AV is better than nothing, but they still miss a lot of things. I'll use Immunet protect as a sort of vaccine for viruses, but somebody has to get infected for it to help. Ultimately, new viruses are always an issue.

Yes, and then I reformat. It's the only way to be sure.