Custer had it easy!

The staff common room at mrs k's school has 3 standalone computers running XP, all choking with viruses. They've never had any www connection, so the attack stuff must have been delivered via CD/DVD, or more likely from the USB drives the teachers use to transfer files between work and home/other.

The AV on these systems were last updated 16 months ago, which figures is also how long the machines have been there. Running a scan with the expired AV comes up with no detected threat, but they are there because they transfer to memsticks. Could be the expired AV misses the newer threats.

I could install a recent AV on the computers and run a scan to clear up some of the threats, but without updates it won't recognise any new threats, so in time the computers will fill up again.

Q1: Is there an AV with updates that can be downloaded as individual files which can be transferred to the school's computers to update? It would also need to be ve-ry easy to handle, for Thai teachers.

Q2: If so, can it be configured to specify which updates to download? For example, if updates have to be done daily/weekly and some are missed, these should be catchable later.

Q3: If not, anyone with an easy fix?


At home we use USB Scan and USB Disk Security, which seem to work well, popping up to scan each time a memstick is inserted, and so far have kept out loads of the school's bad guys. I'm thinking to install these on the school computers, but they scan the USB only, which doesn't help with cleaning out the computer.

Also, not sure if the protection is just one-way, shielding the computer from USB threats but not vice versa. It may be these progs rely on regular AV to protect the computer, and assumes that the computer is clean.

Tia