I was just kind of curious if someone could(or would) breakdown what all the different malware tools used in the Geeks to Go forums do. For example, What are say Combofix's specific duties, what all does it scan and look for, How does it achieve this? What about Hijack this? Does it have certain things it looks for, like signatures in an antivirus? or does it look for certain differentiation? Ccleaner, how does it know when a registry file is bad or when something can be deleted?

i was just thinking about that earlier today as i looked at a laptop at work that had obviously been misused(we just reformatted it.. i didn't try to clean it) and decided that I really have no idea what these tools actually do.

this is kinda just a random question. But i thought maybe it would bring some good conversations

You will learn all of this at geek U.
Some of the mal-ware tools can cause damage if not used correctly, so I do not feel that they should be discussed in an open forum.

Closing this.

Have no idea why a GeekU Freshman would want to know about ComboFix. I suggest you concentrate on your training