Exterminate It! is a comprehensive highly supported and effective Trojan, rootkit, and spyware remover. The program is very tiny but contains a huge virus definition database. The program is also regularly updated and even offers a service where the developers can create virus definitions to a user submitted virus in less than 24 hours.
The Exterminate It! installation was extremely fast and completed in under 5 seconds. The program download was also very economical at only 4.5 megabytes. The free antivirus contained over 150,000 definitions already included with the download. Once the installation was completed, the program automatically started the update process. There were about 14 files to update each of which ranged from 300 to 500 kilobytes. After the update completed, Exterminate It! was armed with an impressive 502,644 definitions.
Exterminate It! virus scanning is extremely fast. While I was unable to actually measure the exact speed of the virus scanning process, it appears to scan files at about 30 to 50 files per second. The program detected the AutoRun Worm on the test system from a file called x.exe. Upon further investigation, I found that x.exe is actually a part of a program called Visual Route Lite or a traceroute program. Therefore this was a false positive. Unfortunately, if x.exe was deleted it would prevent the program from being uninstalled.
Exterminate It! only offers one type of scan and does not include quick or custom scan functionality. Also, the program does not have a status bar or time till completion for a scan. A full system scan appeared to take about 30 minutes to finish on a 100 gigabyte drive, which is quite fast compared to other free antivirus.
During scanning, Exterminate It! used about 76 megabytes of memory and about 20 percent CPU power. These numbers are within line with other comparable antivirus programs. Exterminate It ! has a few nice additional features. First, is it can delete a file permanently if privacy is an issue. Also a user can restore the default settings to IE. Finally, the Submit State functionality allows a user to describe their PC’s program and send a comprehensive report to CuriOlabs for examination and a custom virus definition.
