I just stumbled across Antivirus Defender 1.51. Interestingly, the program doesn’t include it’s own free antivirus engine, rather it relies on the open source clamwin software (A fact that the Cnet Editors choice nomination failed to mention). Therefore, Antivirus Defender is essentially a nice shell over the clamwin command line scanner. While, this is not necessarily unique it adds some additional functionality and makes clamwin more like a mainstream antivirus.
The installation of Antivirus Defender 1.51 was quick and painless. The program was only 14.3 megabytes in size and used about 18 megabytes of RAM. During scanning, the program launches clamscan (the Clam AV scanner)and it uses about 38 megabytes and about 13 percent CPU power. Virus scanning and detection are 100% identical to the stock clamwin detection rates.
Antivirus Defender 1.51 offers a few scanning options. The first is the full system scan. One can select any local drive for scanning. The full system isn’t exactly fast and Antivirus Defender must first build a file list of all files located on the computer. The next option is memory scanning which is pretty self explanatory (it scans a computer’s active processes).
In addition to standard virus scanning, Antivirus Defender can also detect potential viruses and spyware such as broken executables and unwanted programs. The fast scan option allows a user to only selectively scan executables, dll’s, text files (not sure why this is included), zip, and ocx files. Antivirus Defender also has built-in scheduling capability which makes adding a schedule a breeze over typing in a command prompt.
The settings page of Antivirus Defender has an option to enable auto update. During manual updating the program tended to freeze. On one occasion I kept getting a program exception from .net after an unsuccessful virus definitions download. I also ran into a few bugs when using the settings page of the software and some of the menus don’t work correctly.
Antivirus Defender definitely makes virus scanning easier, but it’s hardly ready for the mainstream. The free antivirus needs a lot of polishing and bug fixing before it could be considered as a primary antivirus.
