ClamWin Free Antivirus is a free and open-source antivirus tool for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

. It provides a graphical user interface to the

Clam AntiVirus Clam AntiVirus (ClamAV) is a free software, cross-platform antimalware toolkit able to detect many types of malware, including viruses. It was developed for Unix and has third party versions available for AIX, BSD, HP-UX, Linux, macOS, OpenVM ...

engine.

Features

* Scanning scheduler (only effective with user logged in). * Automatic virus database updates on a regular basis. * Standalone virus-scanner. * Context menu integration for

Windows Explorer File Explorer, previously known as Windows Explorer, is a file manager application that is included with releases of the Microsoft Windows operating system from Windows 95 onwards. It provides a graphical user interface for accessing the file ...

. * Add-in for Microsoft Outlook. * A portable version that can be used from a

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. There are Firefox extensions that allow the users to process downloaded files with ClamWin.

Real-time scanning

ClamWin Free Antivirus scans on demand; it does not automatically scan files as they are read and written. The non-affiliated projects Clam Sentinel and Winpooch are add-ons that provide a real-time scanning capability to ClamWin.

Updates

ClamWin Free Antivirus has a virus database which is updated automatically when it detects connection to the Internet. A small balloon tip appears on the taskbar icon indicating completion status of the update process. It retries to establish connection with the server if it fails to download the updates first time.

Effectiveness

Historically ClamWin Free Antivirus has suffered from poor detection rates and its scans have been slow and less effective than some other antivirus programs. For example, in 2009 ClamWin Free Antivirus failed to detect almost half of the trojan horses, password stealers, and other malware in

AV-TEST AV-TEST is an independent organization which evaluates and rates antivirus and security suite software for Microsoft Windows and Android operating systems, according to a variety of criteria. The organisation is based in Magdeburg, Germany. Ever ...

's "zoo" of malware samples. In the ''1–21 June 2008'' test performed by Virus.gr, ClamWin Free Antivirus version 0.93 detected 54.68% of all threats and ranked 37th out of 49 products tested; the best scored over 99%. In the ''10 August-05 September 2009'' test performed by Virus.gr, ClamWin Free Antivirus version 0.95.2 detected 52.48% of all threats and ranked 43 out of 55 products tested; the best scored 98.89%. On 6 September 2011 cNet gave ClamWin Free Antivirus a rating of excellent, 4 of 5 stars.

References

External links