How to Use the Malwarebytes Antivirus Tool to Remove Unwanted Programs Leave a comment

Included with Hiren’s Boot CD is a tool that can scan, identify, and remove programs that could potentially hide malware, take up unnecessary space, or inhibit your computer in some other way. In this article, we are going to look at how to remove these Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) as they are called in the tool.

You will need Hiren’s BootCD to perform the steps in this article, you can buy a copy of Hiren’s BootCD on our website or you can buy one on Amazon.

A quick preview of what’s to come:

• Open up the Malwarebytes Antivirus tool and start scanning.
• Identify which programs you want to remove
• Remove the unwanted files and programs

Step 1: Start up the Malwarebytes Antivirus tool

The antivirus tool is located in the Utilities/Security/Antivirus folder. Search through the file system until you find it and click on it.

Hiren’s Boot CD uses the free version of the Malwarebytes Antivirus tool, which is all we need for our purposes. Click the “Scan Now” button to start scanning your file system.

Once the tool starts scanning, wait for a few minutes. This will probably take a while depending on how big your hard drive is.

Step 2: Identify which programs to remove

The tool detects any program that has access to private files, store downloaded data, or can modify internal system or program information. It’s likely that the tool will find a lot of PUPs, but that doesn’t mean that your computer is infected with all kinds of different viruses. Most of them will probably be cookies, small, harmless files that store web browser information. This tool will also identify files accidentally left over after downloading or uninstalling a program.

To view the files, you can store the data as a text or csv file to view them easier. It’ll also organize them by the type of program they are, allowing you to choose which PUPs you want to delete and which ones you want to keep.

One thing to keep in mind is that the tool may flag game mods or cheat engines as PUPs since those programs modify program files. Make sure to not delete anything that you want to keep. Just uncheck the files that you want to keep and the tool won’t delete them.

If you don’t have mods or cheat engines and just have a bunch of small, harmless files and cookies, feel free to select everything. Browser data is stored to make loading times slower and save login information. Files accidentally left after downloading a program should have been deleted anyway and nothing will happen if you delete those.

Step 3: Delete all unwanted files

Once you’ve chosen which files to delete, click the “Remove Selected” button at the bottom of the window to uninstall them. After a few moments, the tool will safely delete them.

After deleting the files, restart your computer, remove Hiren’s Boot CD, and boot into Windows. The programs will be gone and you might even notice a slight performance upgrade. If you delete browser data, you might notice some slower speeds when you browse the internet or that you need to log in to certain websites again. This is normal and expected. The tool deletes the data that your browser uses to make those actions faster.

You should use the Malwarebytes Antivirus tool periodically to prevent too many programs from accumulating. This will keep too many programs from accumulating. You should also use this tool when you think your computer might be infected with a virus.

The Malwarebytes Antivirus tool comes pre-installed on Hiren’s Boot CD. If this tool sounds attractive to you, you can buy Hiren’s Boot CD here.