Since Portable ClamWin is just the front-end to ClamAV, these comments may, or may not, be classified as comments on ClamAV itself.

The effort to provide a free antivirus package in itself is commendable. Software of this type is an enormous undertaking to code. More so for on-access scanners than regular scanners like this one, but this effort shouldn't be minimized.

That said, Portable ClamWin offers an excellent alternative scanner to a primary package. I'm not sure if I feel comfortable using it as my primary package yet. I agree with the ClamAV folks assertion that being careful and doing scans proactively on suspeicious files is better than an on-access scanner loaded all the time, taking system resources. However, a ClamAV user would tend to be a more knowledgable computer user. For the average user, an on-access should be employed.

But, be prepared to wait. A long time. ClamWin aint fast. It's not even really slow, its more super slow. Maybe its just being thorough. I don't know, but it claims to have found a virus that Computer Associates/McAfee didn't find. So I submitted it to virustotal: out of the 24 scanners employed, four said the file had a virus, twenty said it didn't. Among the twenty were Kaspersky, Nod32, (of course Norton and McAfee), and FProt. Arguably some of the best AV packages out there. Among those that said it was virus was Sophos and Antivir. So who do you believe? Does majority rule? Is it a false positive? The infected DLL was part of Panda's ActiveScan. Does that suggest a false positive?

Using Portable ClamWin has sorta made me feel a little bit more secure in my antivirus efforts, but has also made me feel a little less secure. It's like the guy with one watch: he always knows what time it is, but the guy with two watches is never sure.

I'm guess I'm sure that I'm not sure I'm more, or less secure.