This one was recommended by one of our forum members. ClamWin Portable is a free Windows antivirus with a difference; it can run entirely from portable media such as a USB flash drive, iPod, portable harddrive or even from a CD without needing to be installed.

Since I had never used this program until it was recommended on our forums recently, I decided to test it out on my own machine.
After I download, ran the installer to put it on my USB flash drive. I executed ClamWin for the first time it immediately asked to go get the latest virus database updates which is a 1 click process. Once it had updated (took around 20 seconds) I let it do a complete system scan of my computer. I figured, being a portable, free antivirus, how good could it be? A picture tells a thousand words:

Uh oh….

It found the bagle worm in one of my old email archives hidden in a zip file. I investigated a little more and the worm didn’t appear to be active, it was just an attachment in an email at some point which I would have ignored. Even so, I have been using AVG Free Antivirus for about 4 years now and it never detected this.

ClamWin Portable definitely impressed me with how well it detected viruses and it ran pretty fast considering its running off a USB drive. You wont find any special features in ClamWin Portable such as a real-time resident virus shield. It is a simple “right click to scan” or “scan my drives” antivirus which does its job excellently. Definitely worthy of being on the flashdrives of onsite techies.

Screenshot:

Downloads:
Download at SourceForge – (5.9mb)