looking for a better system to remove malware

thetourist

i have been fixing peoples pc's of late and up until now i have just been runing up to date scans to remove malware from the pc's : i use a combination of norton, spybot s&d, adaware, pestpatrol, spywareblaster, stinger, sysclean, hijack this and a few others. i use whatever i think might work depending on the state of the machine - also i have a disk with all the worm removal tools from the symantic website.
However i know that at the local pc shop they have a different approach - they remove the drive from the machine and put it in a different machine to scan it with some special scanner - the questions i have are - 1) does anyone know what special scanner they might be using and how to get it ( or is it just a regular norton or something ) - i have done a search on google and found nothing. --- 2) is this technique much better than what i am doing already -- like is it any faster or more thorough ?? 3) surely there is no one single coverall program that would detect and remove viruses, worms, addware, spyware, dialers, etc -- and if this is so then they would have to do multiple scans regardless - so they might as well be done institu ??



your thoughts appreciated
bob

Blub2k4

I'd say they are only using a known clean machine to scan a possibly virus infected machine when they swap the drives, am not aware of any hardware product that is used in this manner for scanning.
The advice when the local scanner is not working sometimes is either to network 1:1 with a clean machine and scan the pc as a mapped drive or take the hard drive and pop it in a known clean machine and scan it there.
Hope that helps.
A good idea if you were looking to do it this way would be to get a USB-ide HDD caddie and attach it to a laptop if you do onsite visits.

thetourist

my laptop is only a 300mhz running 98 - would you say i'd be wasting my time scanning with with that ??


also do you know if it's easy or even possible to connect 2 pc's together via usb so that one can scan the others disk

Blub2k4

That'd be a USB network and it is possible.
I think any machine still running 98 is a waste of time tbh.
I'd advise running 2k or XP also the machine might want to be faster than that, unless you have lots of time, but networking the 98 machine to possibly infected machines is asking for trouble due to 98's non-existant security.

thetourist

thanks again for your advice