Conventional antivirus tools are fine when they’re pitted against established threats, well-known malware with a match in their signature database. If you’ve been hit by something new, though, you may need to go hunting for the culprit manually – and FreeFixer is an excellent tool to help you along the way.

Launch a scan with the program and it’ll examine 39 key areas which may contain signs of malware. These include Browser Help Objects, your HOSTS file, AppInit_DLLs, Windows services, Namespace service providers, shell extensions, running processes, Winlogon modules, Firefox extensions, and more.

In theory this could obviously result in a very lengthy list of files, but FreeFixer helps out here in a couple of ways. Critical Windows system files aren’t included in the report, and files from trusted vendors (Apple, Microsoft, top antivirus companies and more) are displayed, but with a green background to mark them as safe. With sometimes dramatic results.

In the Services section of our test PC, for instance, 43 services were whitelisted and could be safely ignored, leaving only 9 for us to check manually. There were similar results elsewhere – 33 running processes were whitelisted, leaving 9 “unknowns” – and it’s clear that if you are hunting for malicious software on a PC, FreeFixer could save you a great deal of time.

"Trusted" files are highlighted in green, making it easy to concentrate on the most likely potential threats

Ultimately, though, it will be up to you to browse the remaining files and decide if any should be removed. While this is easy enough to do – just check the box to their left and click the “Fix” button – you could obviously cause all kinds of problems if you delete something legitimate, and this really isn’t something you should be trying unless you’ve a complete system backup to hand.

Of course this isn’t a problem specific to FreeFixer, though: any general malware removal tool has its potential risks. If anything, FreeFixer minimises them by removing so many whitelisted files from its report, reducing the chance that you’ll make a mistake.

And even if the program can’t uncover the specific malware executables, it has some bonus features which you may find helpful. One of its sections lists “recently created or modified files”, for example, perhaps highlighting hidden file system activity. Another will detect and fix some HOSTS file issues. And the program can even list and undo system policies sometimes used by malware to make their removal more difficult (preventing you launching REGEDIT, for instance).

There’s no magic solution here, then. FreeFixer can’t precisely identify malware, spyware or anything else. You’ll need to spend some time working through its reports to see if you’re likely to have a problem. And it’s removal tools aren’t particularly strong.

If you believe a PC is infected by something nasty and would like to investigate further, though, FreeFixer can greatly speed up the research process, and on balance it’ll make a great addition to any geek’s security toolkit.