Antivirus Removal Tool - The technician friendly tool to detect and completely remove antivirus software.

[Chipicao]

Rating a product based on company ethics or past practices would make this AV Removal Tool biased. Same with software that you may consider PUA, may not be to others.

Just my opinion.

And? What is the problem with rating? It's optional to user to remove (user is not forced and is unchecked by default), this meaning user should check it to remove... And it's just a warning / notification about that, doesn't mean you will be forced to uninstall it.

Understand the difference between warning than force uninstall by default. This is two completely different things.
Just because you don't may consider it PUA, doesn't mean that others don't consider.

I am an apologist, that everything or that involves abusive schemes Marketing, PUA users should be warned about that, no matter if you don't consider it or not. That is not the cause here.

 

[Ink]

And? What is the problem with rating? It's optional to user to remove (user is not forced and is unchecked by default), this meaning user should check it to remove... And it's just a warning / notification about that, doesn't mean you will be forced to uninstall it.

Understand the difference between warning than force uninstall by default. This is two completely different things.
Just because you don't may consider it PUA, doesn't mean that others don't consider.

I am an apologist, that everything or that involves abusive schemes Marketing, PUA users should be warned about that, no matter if you don't consider it or not. That is not the cause here.

The Dev stated they didn't want to get political about it.

Have you started a cause or petition against bad marketing practices, or just going to type about from your keyboard?

 

[AlexCa]

Fantastic tool, thank you. Basically it's a handy .exe to carry always in your pendrive so you can uninstall any AV with their official uninstaller withouth having to search for it on the internet each time

Thank you! Yes, and it will also help to identify lots of past AV installations, so that the user can remove as thoroughly as possible not only the one that is currently installed, but also the leftovers of others that had been installed in the past.

 

[AlexCa]

Hi everyone,

I've released version 2020.07 (v.1) of Antivirus Removal Tool. Here's what's changed:

### Changed:
- Updated the following uninstallers: McAfee, Norton.

### Fixed
- On non-English systems the leftovers search would not exclude the "Downloads" folder.

Meanwhile, after I had already released this version, a user reported that the program throws an error if Malwarebytes is installed, and that it cannot identify Malwarebytes as the currently installed AV (thanks to Gerard for reporting).

It will first show this message, at the program startup:

And after clicking in "Ok", it will not detect Malwarebytes as the currently installed AV:

I'll try to fix this error as soon as possible, but I don't want to rush. If you guys eventually see this happening with some other AV, please let me know, I appreciate! Thanks.

 

[paulderdash]

...

I've released version 2020.07 (v.1) of Antivirus Removal Tool. Here's what's changed:

### Changed:
- Updated the following uninstallers: McAfee, Norton.

...

According to SUMo, Avast / AVG and ZoneAlarm uninstallers are also now out of date.

 

[AlexCa]

According to SUMo, Avast / AVG and ZoneAlarm uninstallers are also now out of date.

Thank you for the heads up @paulderdash ! I prepared this latest version on 30-06, but meanwhile some vendors updated the uninstallers. I usually check for updates daily, but I didn't this time since I was trying to figure out the Malwarebytes issue. Now I've released version 2020.07 (v.2):

### Added:
- A "default" icon will be shown for the currently installed AV if ART doesn't have one for it.

### Changed:
- Updated the following uninstallers: Avast, AVG, Emsisoft, F-Secure, Malwarebytes, Symantec Enpoint Protection.

### Fixed
- Wrong translation of the word "Run" (that is in the button that runs the uninstallers) to the French language. Thanks to Christophe, from French website sospc.

Note: the uninstaller for Zone Alarm is not publicly available, it must be requested to Zone Alarm support. In this particular case the detection from SUMo is not accurate because it's not for the uninstaller, but for other Zone alarm products.

 

[Stopspying]

Thanks for this tool, have just run it on 3 devices. It found remnants of Emsisoft Anti-Malware on one PC, some leftovers from testing Avira, ESET and BitDefender on another one and found ESET Online Scanner on the one I'm using to post this. So I thought I'd flag up that it discovers online scanners as well as full AVs.

 

[dinosaur07]

Did a scan by curiosity: no leftover found. Nice tool.

 

[AlexCa]

Did a scan by curiosity: no leftover found. Nice tool.

Just a heads up: the program "only" detects leftovers for the 29 antivirus programs that are listed in the combobox (so, for the AV companies that provide official dedicated uninstallers). Fortunately, the most popular ones are all there.

Originally, it would detect leftovers for 54 antivirus programs. But because those others don't provide dedicated uninstallers, or because of other issues, I decided not to include them in the detections.

The reason is that faced with the absence of the detected program in the "Control Panel > Add / Remove Programs", and faced with the absence of a dedicated uninstaller, the user would probably just try to manually delete the detected folders (generally a bad option, as explained in this post). And if that goes wrong, a machine that otherwise is functional (if it can run Antivirus Removal tool, it implies that it can enter the OS and run programs), might start throwing errors or worst.

FYI, these are the AV's whose detection I removed:
BullGuard, AhnLab, Arcabit, Cezurity, Nano Antivirus, nProtect Anti-Virus, Quick Heal, SentinelOne, 360 Total Security, SUPERAntiSpyware, F-PROT, Cylance, ALYac, Baidu, Bkav, ClamAV, IKARUS, Jiangmin, Kingsoft AntiVirus, Norman, Roboscan, SPAMfighter, VirusBuster, Zillya, Tencent.

@dinosaur07, sorry for the long post! I took the opportunity to explain a bit further about the functionality.

 

[dinosaur07]

Just a heads up: the program "only" detects leftovers for the 29 antivirus programs that are listed in the combobox (so, for the AV companies that provide official dedicated uninstallers). Fortunately, the most popular ones are all there.

Originally, it would detect leftovers for 54 antivirus programs. But because those others don't provide dedicated uninstallers, or because of other issues, I decided not to include them in the detections.

The reason is that faced with the absence of the detected program in the "Control Panel > Add / Remove Programs", and faced with the absence of a dedicated uninstaller, the user would probably just try to manually delete the detected folders (generally a bad option, as explained in this post). And if that goes wrong, a machine that otherwise is functional (if it can run Antivirus Removal tool, it implies that it can enter the OS and run programs), might start throwing errors or worst.

FYI, these are the AV's whose detection I removed:
BullGuard, AhnLab, Arcabit, Cezurity, Nano Antivirus, nProtect Anti-Virus, Quick Heal, SentinelOne, 360 Total Security, SUPERAntiSpyware, F-PROT, Cylance, ALYac, Baidu, Bkav, ClamAV, IKARUS, Jiangmin, Kingsoft AntiVirus, Norman, Roboscan, SPAMfighter, VirusBuster, Zillya, Tencent.

@dinosaur07, sorry for the long post! I took the opportunity to explain a bit further about the functionality.

Thanks @AlexCa I found your post useful and interesting anyhow.

 

[AlexCa]

Hi, I've updated the program to version 2020.07 (v.3). Updated two uninstallers and fixed an incompatibility with Malwarebytes.

### Changed:
- Updated the following uninstallers: Emsisoft, Panda.

### Fixed
- An incompatibility with Malwarebytes: Antivirus Removal Tool would throw an error and wouldn't be able to detect any currently installed AV. Because of that, if a scan for leftovers was performed by the user, those currently installed AV's would wrongly be shown in the field for the past installations instead.

 

[Cortex]

Maybe I'm wrong here & an enquiry but the tool doesn't remove registry entries? Removing registry entries can be critical, most uninstallers for AV's at least make some effort at removing registry entries? Just wondered?

 

[OTTO]

Where is download link?

 

[Ink]

Where is download link?

First post.

Antivirus Removal Tool - The technician friendly tool to detect and completely remove antivirus software.

Antivirus Removal Tool (freeware) is a portable program to detect and completely remove antivirus software. It will help you to identify current and past installations, and it will provide you with the official specialized uninstallers.

antivirus-removal-tool.com

 

[AlexCa]

Maybe I'm wrong here & an enquiry but the tool doesn't remove registry entries? Removing registry entries can be critical, most uninstallers for AV's at least make some effort at removing registry entries? Just wondered?

Hi Cortex, check out this previous post, it explains a bit about how the tool works: Update - Antivirus Removal Tool - The technician friendly tool to detect and completely remove antivirus software.

 

[uninfected1]

Will this remove leftovers it finds or do they have to be removed manually?

 

[AlexCa]

Will this remove leftovers it finds or do they have to be removed manually?

The dedicated uninstallers will do the job of removing the leftovers. The search for previously installed antivirus is to inform the user about what products were installed in the past.

 

[sartic]

Too big!

Click to download the latest version of Antivirus Removal Tool (159 MB)

I wrote for me it is less than 300KB. It detects product and downloads official uninstaller per each product and run them.

 

[AlexCa]

Too big!

Click to download the latest version of Antivirus Removal Tool (159 MB)

I wrote for me it is less than 300KB. It detects product and downloads official uninstaller per each product and run them.

That's the first approach I've considered (making it work similarly to Windows Repair Toolbox), but looking at the downsides of that approach on one hand, and at the size of the zip on the other, plus the benefits of having it offline, I ended up choosing to go for the offline route.

 

[pxxb1]

I just ran this tool after uninstalling Panda free Av with their own uninstaller. No leftovers. Then i ran - Driver store explorer - to look after old drivers, it found 21 of them from Panda.