Today’s anti-virus solutions are pretty reliable, protecting you from most of the common threats out there in the world. With safe browsing habits, there’s a rare chance that you’d ever get infected with malware. However, there’s never a guarantee that you’ll be completely safe if you are simply careful and run your anti-virus software.

Especially when it comes to zero-day threats, sometimes things just happen to you that you can’t blame on yourself. No matter if it’s your fault or not that your Windows system gets infected, you’ll need a plan to get rid of it before it renders your system completely unusable without serious recovery methods.

If the malware you’ve caught prevents you from touching any sort of tool that might have a chance in removing it, you should probably take a look at using an Ubuntu Live CD.