More and more people are becoming aware of the increasing malware menace everyday. Now more people have started to install antivirus products on their PC and regularly scan their PC. While this is a very good way to keep yourself malware-free, most of the antivirus products take a huge amount of time to scan your computer. If you feel uneasy by the never ending scanning progress of your antivirus, then you can try the Bitdefender 60 Second Virus Scanner. It is a free desktop app that utilizes the cloud scanning technology to quickly scan the malware lurking in your PC.
Here are some of the key features of the Bitdefender 60 Second Virus Scanner:
- It is very fast scanner which boasts of detecting malware and finishing the scan in less than 60 seconds.
- It has components to automatically perform all the scanning processes in the background without any user interaction.
- It uses cloud scanning technology which means faster scanning and always up-to-date virus definitions.
- In addition to malware, it can also show your PC’s vulnerabilities discreetly.
You can downnload Bitdefender 60 Second Virus Scanner from the Bitdefender website. The download is only 155 kilobytes executable. When you run this downloaded executable, it further downloads around 10 megabytes of the actual installer based on your operating system (different installer for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows). The installation is very easy to go through.
After the installation is over, it would place an icon in the notification area (also called system tray) of Windows. You can click on this system tray icon to view the main 60 Second Virus Scanner window which has a very easy user interface. You can click on the Start Scan button to start the scanning. The counter in the window would start to count down from 60 seconds to 0. After the 60 seconds are over, it would send the data to Bitdefender servers and wait for the report to arrive – this takes more than 3 minutes. In the end, it would show the report and you can click on the Report button to view the report for your system.
The report window shows the time taken to finish the scanning, number of scanned files and processes etc. On my Windows 7 system, it took 198 seconds for the first time scan (in the later scans the time actually reduced to less than 60 seconds). It would show a list of all different areas it scans like malware found, if Windows update is enabled, if there is a firewall enabled and so on. If it finds an issue in your system, you can fix it by clicking on the Fix It link next to it.
However, if it actually finds a malware threat on your PC, it shows only an alert window, option to view the log file and an advertisement for Bitdefender Total Security underneath. There is no option to fix, clean or remove the malware for free. You have to buy the Bitdefender Total Security to clean the threats on your system.
In the options for Bitdefender 60 Second Virus Scanner, you can set it to start automatically with Windows, scan critical areas of your system, automatically check for updates etc. You can also choose an automatic scan frequency from daily, weekly or monthly.
Bitdefender 60 Second Virus Scanner is a very simple cloud based virus scanner that is compatible with other antivirus products. In addition to malware scanning, it checks your PC for other security related issues e.g., if firewall is installed and enabled, if Windows Automatic Update service is running or not, antivirus protection is enabled etc. Even if you have installed a security product, you can use Bitdefender 60 Second Virus Scanner to get extra protection for free.
You can download Bitdefender 60 Second Virus Scanner from http://www.bitdefender.com/solutions/60-second-virus-scanner.html.