Portable Antivirus 1.6 by Data0.net is a new free antivirus that has been out for about 2 years. The antivirus is really portable in that the entire download is only 3.5 megabytes. Even in its small size, the program offers extensive configuration and even a real time scanning engine. In addition as of today, the Portable Antivirus can detect up to 9700 viruses.
The installation of Portable Antivirus 1.6 isn’t exactly a pleasant experience on Windows 7. While the program installed correctly in the start menu, the program was unable to initially launch. I changed the settings to Administrator privileges and Windows XP compatibility to get it to work. The problem appears to lie in the update functionality. If an update is run from inside the program it fails and the program crashes. Thankfully, Data0.net has provided an external update option (found in the Programs folder). This was successfully able to update the program.
The interface of Portable Antivirus 1.6 is simple and aesthetically pleasing and aside from the update problems, completely functional. During virus scanning, the program uses about 30 megabytes and about 13% CPU power. Portable Antivirus also scans at a respectable 10 megabytes per second.
In order to test the antivirus engine, I downloaded a few test viruses and the program successfully detected all of them. Portable Antivirus also includes a real-time protection engine. Unfortunately, whenever I start the program I am prompted to run the antivirus in standalone mode. Therefore, it’s necessary to navigate to the menu and turn real time protection back on. The real-time engine supports different priorities of scanning from high, medium or low.
Portable Antivirus 1.6 includes a fantastic help guide. The company really spent a lot of time documenting all of the program’s features. The software also creates a shell extension so that one can right click any file that they would like to scan. Finally, the program includes the option to install itself on a USB or removable drive. A handy wizard automatically detects a removable drive and installs the antivirus on to it.
While Portable Antivirus 1.6 is still in development (version 1.7 to be released soon) it shows a lot of potential and we will definitely be following more developments in the future.
