DriveSentry

DriveSentry is an intuitive and approachable program made to facilitate round-the-clock system security by combining antivirus, anti-spyware and HIPS technologies.

Its purpose is to protect computers from the latest threats using blacklisted signatures, whitelisted app identities and information gathered from the DriveSentry Advisor Community. It's free.

Before proceeding any further, you should know that this anti-malware tool hasn't been updated for a very long time and it seems that the project is discontinued, so its virus signatures are no longer up to date.

Packed in a user-friendly interface, DriveSentry has a clear-cut main configuration panel and offers real-time PC security as soon as it gets installed. The protection, access, scanner, quarantine, logs and Advisor modules, along with the options section can be separately accessed.

When it comes to security configuration, you can handpick the folders and file types you want to keep track of for suspicious activity, as well as choose the system settings to monitor for changes made by untrusted programs. These include a self-protection module that prevents third parties from hijacking the computer by disabling DriveSentry, together with Windows startup options.

Rules can be managed for specific applications, like allowing or denying a tool to write to removable media, the registry, or any files. Meanwhile, scan operations may be conducted on all fixed and removable drives, fixed drives only, most common malware hiding sports (quick mode), or custom directories.

It's possible to pause and resume scan jobs, send suspicious files to the quarantine for closer inspection, as well as permanently eliminate objects from the quarantine or restore them to their original location on the disk.

As for logs, you can study details concerning files, registry and combined writes, in addition to the date and time, source and output path, along with the status of each file. DriveSentry Advisor reveals the most popular programs and recently blacklisted malware agents, plus a pie chart with known malware, items submitted by users, and objects trusted by the tool.

The software application didn't hang, crash or display error messages in our tests. It carried out scan jobs in reasonable time during which it remained light on system resources consumption.

However, given the fact that any project development on DriveSentry is (at least) halted at the moment, the utility cannot be trusted with its out-of-date virus signatures.