microsoft windows malicious software removal tool running

There are lots of reasons why this is a perfectly valid thing to say, starting with the tool’s inability to provide real-time protection for e-mail attachments, file downloads, and so forth, and ending with its abysmally slow complete system scan time (on my system PC Doctor usually takes under 20 minutes to scan everything, and my AVG Anti-Virus usually finishes up in under 25 minutes. I started of with the quick check scan, which completed in less than a minute on my machine (and found nothing), and then launched a scan at the command line ( mrt.exe /F:Y, to force a full scan, and to instruct the tool to fix any infections it might find).Įven Microsoft says you shouldn’t use this free program in lieu of a real anti-virus/anti-spyware tool. So I visted the aforementioned download link and installed the version manually on my machine. As I write this blog on, it’s only the first Tuesday of the month, so the latest version is dated, as documented in KB article 890830 (there’s also a download).Īfter reading that this tool resides in %windir%System32, in a file named mrt.exe, I checked mine and found that I couldn’t run the program for some reason or another, and that the version installed was dated. If you’ve ever looked over the regular updates that get delivered the second Tuesday of every month (so-called “Patch Tuesday”) to your Vista machine, you can’t help but have noticed the regular appearance of something called the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool.

Microsoft windows malicious software removal tool running