I do a little PC tech stuff on the side and it mostly consists of finding and removing spyware/adware and viruses. This usually means I have to install Spybot and/or Ad-Aware and AVG. What I would like is something that I can just run from a CD without installing. Is there anything out there like that?
For viruses, there’s always http://housecall.trendmicro.com. You can also download Trend Micro’s sysclean from their site. You can put it onto a CD, but you will have to keep updating definitions, so you’d need to burn a new one each week or so.
McAfee has something called “stinger” that does a cleaning of major viruses, but it, too, requires updates, so your disks would quickly be out of date.
For spyware, there isn’t much. Some site supposedly scan your computer via the web, but I think they require you to buy the software to actually remove the spyware. And you would also have the updating issue.
I would suggest you install Spyware Blaster on all the computers in your organization. It’s the one bit of sofware that prevents spyware from being installed, and it does not have to run in the background. It allows you to be proactive and you just have to have your users update it from time to time.