CyberNotes: Best Portable Antivirus Software
October 9th, 2007
Written by Ryan
–Portable ClamWin
–Portable Antivirus
–MicroWorld Free Antivirus
http://cybernetnews.com/2007/10/09/cybe ... -software/
Best Portable Antivirus Software
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spaztastic
- Posts: 77
- Joined: Mon Mar 03, 2008 6:29 pm
These are several choices:
ClamWin Portable
McAfee AVERT Stinger
Dr. Web CureIt
Multi Virus Cleaner
Kaspersky AVP
Avast Virus/Worm Cleaner
A few of those are for more specific malware, such as only the most dangerous or difficult to remove. In my opinion, ClamWin Portable is the best due to the fact that it has a very large definitions file and it seems to have updates for it more than the others do. Not to mention the fact that it is normally a full-blown anti-virus program for protection and is very handy as a portable program.
ClamWin Portable
McAfee AVERT Stinger
Dr. Web CureIt
Multi Virus Cleaner
Kaspersky AVP
Avast Virus/Worm Cleaner
A few of those are for more specific malware, such as only the most dangerous or difficult to remove. In my opinion, ClamWin Portable is the best due to the fact that it has a very large definitions file and it seems to have updates for it more than the others do. Not to mention the fact that it is normally a full-blown anti-virus program for protection and is very handy as a portable program.
I checked out the second link in that post, Portable Antivirus by Data0.Net.
While legitimate, I found their 1.6 beta to be very buggy; it really REALLY wanted files to exist in "C:\Data0.Net Software\Portable Antivirus" and would choke when they didn't. In addition, it had an option to copy itself to a portable drive, but would fail to copy pavbase.dll (which I ended up retrieving from the Temp folder manually while PAV was running) and even then, it had issues finding its own virus definitions file. On top of that, the definitions updater was buggy and would crash before renaming the newly downloaded definitions file.
1.5 was actually functional, but writes to the registry and doesn't seem to be capable of using an external virus definitions file, meaning you can't update it with new virus definitions; someone correct me if I'm wrong here. For those that are curious, it writes to HKCU\Software\Data0.Net (or something like that).
On the bright side, I snagged ACE, their ''Classic Explorer'' file browser, which weighed in at only 80KB (and is portable and stealth) to throw on my flash drive. You can find it in the extracted contents of their 1.6 beta installer. PrisonCell was also interesting, but used "C:\Data0.Net Software\PrisonCell" as its home directory, so isn't portable without a wrapper; it's some sort of file encryptor meant to be used for storing malware samples to test virus scanners with.
Queue
While legitimate, I found their 1.6 beta to be very buggy; it really REALLY wanted files to exist in "C:\Data0.Net Software\Portable Antivirus" and would choke when they didn't. In addition, it had an option to copy itself to a portable drive, but would fail to copy pavbase.dll (which I ended up retrieving from the Temp folder manually while PAV was running) and even then, it had issues finding its own virus definitions file. On top of that, the definitions updater was buggy and would crash before renaming the newly downloaded definitions file.
1.5 was actually functional, but writes to the registry and doesn't seem to be capable of using an external virus definitions file, meaning you can't update it with new virus definitions; someone correct me if I'm wrong here. For those that are curious, it writes to HKCU\Software\Data0.Net (or something like that).
On the bright side, I snagged ACE, their ''Classic Explorer'' file browser, which weighed in at only 80KB (and is portable and stealth) to throw on my flash drive. You can find it in the extracted contents of their 1.6 beta installer. PrisonCell was also interesting, but used "C:\Data0.Net Software\PrisonCell" as its home directory, so isn't portable without a wrapper; it's some sort of file encryptor meant to be used for storing malware samples to test virus scanners with.
Queue