Why we no longer recommend HijackThis?

HijackThis is a utility that produces a listing of certain settings found in your computer.
It will scan your registry and various other files for entries that are similar to what a Spyware or Hijacker program would leave behind.
The limitations of this program are:

• It hasn't been updated in a long time, so a lot of rootkits can be hidden from it quite easily and may even stop it from running.
• It has limitations in that it can only remove the registry entries that it shows.
• It can't remove files, folders etc.
• It can't enumerate 64bit systems very well at all.
• The report is very basic.

OTL can be used to both scan a system and run fixes on it. The output of the standard scans is in a format similar to that of HijackThis but is a lot more detailed.
The advantages of this program are:

• We can remove anything in the reports... Registry entries, files, folders, drivers, services etc.
• Is designed to run on WinXP, Vista and Win7 64bit systems as well as 32bit systems.
• The reports can be as short or as detailed as we want them to be.

In short, OTL not only gives us the information we need.... it also gives us the means to remove whatever we find.
This enables us to help you more quickly.

Farbar Recovery Scan Tool (FRST) is a diagnostic tool incorporating the ability to execute prepared script solutions on malware infected machines. It will work equally well in normal or safe mode and where a machine has boot up problems it will work efficiently in the Windows Recovery Environment. It's ability to work in the recovery environment makes it particularly useful in dealing with problems associated with machines experiencing difficulty when booting up.

• It's regularly updated to account for new malware variants.
• We can remove anything in the reports... Registry entries, files, folders, drivers, services etc.
• Is designed to run on WinXP, Vista, Win7 and Win8 64bit systems as well as 32bit systems.
• The reports can be as short or as detailed as we want them to be.

Thank you.