Monthly Archives: October 2014

Avira Rescue CD: Very Valuable

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Avira Rescue 2-2In the 03/2014 issue of the german computer magazine com! there has been the very helpful Avira Rescue DVD.

The DVD contains a bootable system with

  • an Ubuntu version as OS
  • the Avira Rescue System including a virus scanner. If an internet connection is available, the virus scanner downloads the latest virus signatures.
  • A Team Viewer client. You get to the Team Viewer client via the second tab Support in the Avira Rescue System. See image below.
  • The Avira registry editor. You can start it via the third tab Tools in the Avira Rescue System.
  • Firefox, may be well used for research
  • Gparted, a partition editor
  • A manual
  • The Linux Live USB Creator

Avira Rescue 1

And the best: the DVD also contains an iso image of a CD which contains nearly all the stuff mentioned above. You can download the rescue iso image and the manual directly from Avira.

Of course, you can put the iso image to an USB stick to make a bootable USB rescue stick, too. The com! DVD contains the Linux Live USB Creator to do this.

The rescue system does work on Win 7 PCs and Laptops and Win 8 PCs, but not on Win 8 Laptops.

Further Tools

Avira Rescue 3The base of the rescue system is a trimmed Ubuntu and it contains a lot of the things usuallay present there. Some of these tools can be started directly from Ubuntu’s Unity launcher on the left. From top to bottom, the start menu is preconfigured with these entries:

  • Unity Dash
  • Avira Rescue System
  • Firefox
  • Home, a file browser
  • GParted
  • Terminal

But there are more tools available, like

  • a screenshot tool
  • an image viewer
  • a pdf viewer
  • Midnight Commander

How to start these further tools:

  1. Click onto the topmost icon in the start screen, Dash. This will open a window containing the last used programs.
  2. Here, click onto the second icon at the bottom which looks like a ruler besides a pencil besides a pen.
  3. In the next view, click onto Show 45 more results somewhere in the middle of the screen.
  4. Now you’ll see all the installed tools.

Where is my C: drive?

In the running file browser or other tools, you can find your C: drive under File System/target/C:.

What do you use as a rescue tool?

VirusTotal

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VirusTotalUploaderAs you can see from my posts about password managers, I’m a bit paranoid with the internet.

One virus checker is not enough for me. Indeed, I let VirusTotal check every executable I download from the internet. VirusTotal uses 50 or so virus scanners and scans your file with all of them. You can upload files with a size of up to 64 MB.
It should be safer to let VirusTotal check your downloads than to trust your single anti virus software.

If we can trust VirusTotal, that is.

What is even better than using VirusTotal by uploading files to their web page is to install the VirusTotal Uploader on your PC.

The uploader has these advantages:

  • You get a popup menu entry Send to > VirusTotal.
  • Often, the uploader is much faster.
    Because before uploading the file, the uploader calculates a hash from the file and asks at home if this file has already been analyzed. If yes, your file needs not to be uploaded and not to be analyzed. The uploader then just shows the result. This is very often the case and saves you a lot of time when you don’t have a fast uplink.

The only disadvantage of the uploader: It can upload only files up to 32 MB.

The picture below shows a VirusTotal result page.

VirusTotal Results

Disable Capslock

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The capslock key is not only unnecessary, it is harmful. I estimate it has cost millions of hours of productive working time since the advent of personal computers.

But it is easy to disable it completely on a Windows PC. Just download and unzip the attached DisableCapsLock.zip and execute the contained DisableCapsLock.reg file. Done. If not done, restart your computer.