RUN A SECOND ANTI-VIRUS WITHOUT IT CLASHING

What you need: Emsisoft Emergency Kit; USB stick; Windows XP, Vista, 7 or 8 Time required: 45 minutes

its telltale tagline ‘Every hero needs a sidekick’, Emsisoft Emergency Kit is a brilliant free security program that works alongside your existing antivirus program (without clashing) to beef up your PC’S security. Its powerful scan engines will find and remove viruses, trojans, spyware, PUPS, keyloggers and adware that your antivirus may overlook. We’ll show you how to tweak its default settings to quarantine infected files, and you can even use it as a portable program to scan other PCS.

STEP1

Go to www.snipca.com/17590, click the green Download button, then open the downloaded setup file. If you want to use Emsisoft Emergency Kit as a portable program, click Browse 1 , navigate to your USB stick, click OK, then click Extract. To install it on your current PC, simply click Extract 2 . You won’t see the usual notification at this point asking you to uninstall your current antivirus program (we’re using Kaspersky Internet Security 2015 – see page 68 for our Reader Offer). Open Start Emsisoft Emergency Kit on your Desktop (or USB stick), then click Yes to update the program’s virus definitions.

STEP2

When that’s done, the Update tile on the left will turn green. Now click the Scan tile to see options for three types of scans 1 . Before running a scan, we’ll tweak the program’s default scan settings. Click ‘Performance settings’ 2 , and you’ll see that all your processors and the ‘Use advanced caching’ boxes are ticked by default. Now set the number of threads to its highest possible value 3 , set the ‘Scan thread priority’ to High 4 , then click OK. This basically dedicates all your PC’S resources to carrying out a more comprehensive (albeit slower) scan.