Anti-Virus is a class of software that remains a firmly held by commercial companies.
ClamWin Antivirus is one of the better open source anti-virus program that is invading that stronghold in the MS Windows domain. (Is there others?)
ClamWin is based on the ClamAV antivirus engine. Harnessing the power of the community, the concept of an opensource virus directory look set to take on the commercial counterpart.
I decided to check it out a year ago when reinstalling my Win XP. The last anti-virus from Trend Micro never make a return.
My first impression after seeing the main screen of the program is that it still have some way to go in catching up with commercial equivalents.
Over time ClamWin had improved but mainly in the look department. Functionality wise it is very much a plain scanner.
You may have an insecure feeling about it, whether it can catch that virus that will wipe out the system.
That was my thoughts too. Over the last one year it caught no less than 5 viruses. So it does works!
Despite the spartan look it is has fairly complete features.
- File scanning
speed is rather slow (no quantitiave data though but does seems slower) Nice animation though. - Online virus database update
initial database took a while to download, subsequent updates are fast, simple and automated. - Nice set of preference
Wish List
- Scanning on file access, download
- Clean, recover file
- Integration with email scanning
(Since moving to GMail, this became less important to me but nevertheless still a must have) - Integration with spyware scanning
- Localization of interface
Chinese support
No Chinese support. The main reason none of my desktop at work is using it.
Where to get it?
- ClamWin is at http://www.clamwin.com/
- Current version: 0.88.3.1
- Function: Windows Anti virus scanner
Popularity: 16%
I had missed this post. I have just installed this on my windows machine (yes, I still run windows, but only to play World of Warcraft ;) and I’ll see what it does. I think this PC is already infected with one or two virusses, so we’ll see if ClamWin will catch those.