It's been a while since I looked into this and am now sadly a little out of touch - blame my job for taking me away from day to day contact with PC problems.

Anyway - I used to carry a bunch of utilities with me wherever I went, some were freebies others paid for by myself and I used them to help me diagnose faults, fix faults and fix issues with software - be they virus or malware or whatever related.

So, my question is:

Apart from the obvious OS disks, what do you use that you can boot a PC from to troubleshoot hardware and software issues?

Specifically one thing that seems to be lacking these days (I confess I haven't serached too hard) is an AV app that I can run from a CD with the possibility of downloading the latest updates into RAM. I always used to use F-Prot on a bootable floppy for this and update the sigs just before going off out to fix whatever. Now I have little clue.

Suggestions please?

Many thanks.

As far as AVs and malware, I still use good ol' AVG Free and Spybot S&D, but, being on dial-up it takes me about 3 weeks to download even the smallest of malware....ha ha.

I'm a big fan of Winternal's ERD Commander. You have to pay for it but it's worth every penny.

I normally use UBCD which has just about everything you could need on it.

Ah yes - ERD. That's one of my paid for tools.

Though didn't MS take them over and make the 2003 version free? I only have ERD 2000.

UBCD - for some reason I haven't spotted that previously but had grabbed a copy just yesterday but haven't had time to play as of yet.

Thanks for the reply.