Avast! provides one of the most popular antivirus software free avast. They happen to be my favorite free antivirus because of the features they provide and without the need to constantly up-sell to the full versions. I think the company really wants to serve the greater good and has great intentions.
Regardless of all of this, Avast provides a plethora of security tools. The one I want to focus on is Avast Virus Cleaner. The cleaner is infact not available from the official Avast website so we want to keep the software out there. We provided a direct download link below.
Anyways, what makes the Avast Virus Cleaner excellent is it’s compact size. The program is contained completely in a 400 kilobyte package. This is really a feat of engineering. The free antivirus contains a system to configure administrator privileges, a full system scanner, and 100’s of virus definitions. The scanner also scans extremely fast and completes in about an hour and uses minimal resources. In fact, during virus scanning, Avast Virus Cleaner only used 5 megabytes of Ram and under 5 percent CPU power. What’s also nice is rather than scanning for location based traces Avast scans all files for any virus remnants. Some of the viruses that Avast Virus Cleaner can accurately detect are Badtrans, Beagle, BugBear, FunLove, MyDoom, Klex, Netsky, Nimda, Sasser. Sobig, Tenga, Yaha, Sircam, Scold and many more prevalent viruses. All of this protection and the cleaner can easily fit on a thumb drive for easy and quick scanning.
There are a few downsides to Avast Virus Cleaner. One is the virus database is kind of tiny at only a few hundred definitions. Two, there is no auto update feature built-in to the software limiting detection to only the virus definitions that are installed. Finally, one must give the program administrative options by typing in a user name and password which is quite archaic and should be integrated into UAC.
Regardless, Avast Virus Cleaner is an excellent virus scanner that can be depended on to clean popular viruses and worms. If you have a bad infection, especially on a legacy system give the software a go.
