Avira has launched a standalone antivirus scanner, Avira PC Cleaner, which can be used as a second-opinion on-demand antivirus scanner, should you feel the need to, and if you think that you might have a malware infection which your main security software may be missing.
Avira PC Cleaner
Avira PC Cleaner can be used in parallel with other anti-malware software. It is a mere 2.17MB download and doesn’t require installation or registration – nor does it install any drivers. But once you run the downloaded installer file, it will first download updates, definitions and other files of over 100MB. It installs these files in a temporary folder.
It will create two shortcuts on your desktop. One to open the scanner, and the other to delete the downloaded files folder. So to remove this product from your computer you have to click the second icon. Once you do that, the temporary files will be delete plus these two shortcuts too disappeared in my case.
The scanner is rather feature-less. It will either perform a quick-scan or a full scan, which is quite time-consuming. There is no way to scan only a particular drive.
Once the scan is completed, you will be presented with the results. All the entries found in my case were false-positives for sure, and hence I chose not to delete them. So do examine the results before you decide to delete any file.
Whenever you are using a second-opinion scanner, it is recommended that you first deactivate the main installed security software temporarily, and then run the scan, so that the files will not be scanned twice, and your scan will complete faster.
You can download Avira PC Cleaner from here. The current version is in German only, but there are plans to release an English version soon.
UPDATE: Download the English version by clicking here.
Apart from this new release, Avira also offers two other standalone tools:
Need more options? Check these links:
- Standalone On demand Antivirus Scanners
- Free Online AntiVirus Scanners
- Online malware scanners using multiple antivirus engines.
