Root Kit Detection Utility

What’s a “root kit”? No, it isn’t something for your garden.

The term rootkit is used to describe the mechanisms and techniques whereby malware, including viruses, spyware, and trojans, attempt to hide their presence from spyware blockers, antivirus, and system management utilities. There are several rootkit classifications depending on whether the malware survives reboot and whether it executes in user mode or kernel mode.

That definition is from Sysinternals, who has made available a free root kit detection utility called RootkitRevealer.
Note that it doesn’t clean anything it finds, it simply reports it; so, this is useless for most PC users unless they have some knowledge about Window’s innards. Even then, you’ll have to know what results are acceptable, like $MFT.

Conclusion: Sysinternals probably had fun developing it, but for most users it’s useless because it doesn’t flag what’s malicious; its output is meaningless unless you know how Windows works.