There are a lot of things you can do to protect yourself. You can educate yourself on new potential threats, read on how to keep your computer secure, and what security software doesn’t protect, and obtain the best tools for the job, whether they are anti-virus programs or extensions.

Here, I’ll be taking a look at ClamWin, an open-source anti-virus program that’s been around for a while. Should you get it? Read on to find out.

Getting ClamWin

ClamWin is an anti-virus program based on the only open-source anti-virus solution in the market, Clam AV, which is a toolkit initially designed for UNIX.

As you can probably tell by the name, ClamWin is available as a download for Windows machines only. You can download the installer here, which is almost 40MB, or you can also try the portable app for anti-virus protection on the go.

If you’re wondering about which version to go with, I’m using the portable version 0.97.3 for this review. This latest release has improved bytecode signature matching, in addition to the reigning features that characterize this anti-virus – virus scanner, scanning scheduler, automatic virus database updates, and integration with Windows Explorer and Microsoft Outlook.

If you’re using the installer, be aware that the Ask toolbar might be offered during the installation. Make sure you read what the checkboxes are offering before you click Next. I didn’t see any such thing during the portable application “installation”.

Launching ClamWin

When you first launch ClamWin, you’ll likely need to download the built-in database of viruses.

Doing so will just take a few seconds if you’re connected to the Internet.

Once ClamWin has finished updating its Database, you can see the main window where you’ll have the options to set your preferences, update your virus definition database once again, scan programs currently running in memory and finally, scan specific files or directories.

Running Memory Scan

Selecting this option allows you to scan the programs that are currently running in memory. If you’re as paranoid as this author, t’s probably a good idea to update your virus definition database before running your scans.

Unless you’re running Photoshop, Mozilla Firefox, and many other resource hogs, this scan should be completed in a couple of minutes. Mine took just over 3 minutes and scanned 28 processes in memory.

Running File Or Directory Scan

In the main window, there will be a directory browser where you can select a whole drive (e.g. your C drive), specific folder or even a file to scan.

Depending on what you chose, this scan can obviously last a while. When I was running a scan for my D drive, ClamWin was also working really hard, using almost 109 MB of RAM. Not that it’s a bad sign, but it’s probably a good idea not to multi-task on your PC while you let a scan run through an entire disk drive. After a scan is finished, you can see the report right after, save it or access it in the main window menu.

If a virus is detected during the scan, there are three options you can choose from in the Preferences: Quarantine it, report it, or remove it.

If you’re particular about your scans, you can also filter files to be included or excluded from the scan in the Preferences. You can also limit a file size to scan or not, and also whether to extract files from zipped files in the Preferences window.

If you installed ClamWin instead of using the portable version, you’ll be able to schedule scans right in the Preferences window, increasing security for your PC.

If you’re using the portable version and wish to schedule scans, you could always use Windows Task Schedulerand clamscan.exe which should be under ClamWinPortable/App/clamwin/bin.

ClamWin shines for being an open-source anti-virus program with file and directory scanners, scanner scheduler, automatic downloads of virus databases and more. It does lack a real-time scanner, which could be a big con, but for basic protection and its price, it’s a great product to have on your PC security arsenal.

Have you used Clam AV or ClamWin? Share your experience in the comments section below!

Help us build the list! All you need to do is leave a comment below, with your favorite portable apps (and links), as well as why you love them. Make sure these apps are not in the list below, which our staff compiled. The five commenters we deem most helpful will win a free MakeUseOf T-shirt! It’s our way of saying thanks.

What are you waiting for? Check out this list and leave your suggestions below!

Security/Privacy

• ToddlerTrap
• ClamWin
• LicenseCrawler
• Magical Jellybean Finder
• KeePass

Productivity

• OpenOffice
• CorruptOffice2txt
• WriteMonkey
• FocusWriter
• Notepad2
• Abiword

Communication

• Pidgin
• Miranda IM
• Skype
• Email Stripper

Web/FTP

• Google Chrome
• Firefox
• Filezilla

System Tools

• 7-Zip
• Zip2Fix
• CCleaner
• GetFolderSize
• SpaceSniffer
• Recuva
• TeraCopy
• Zscreen

Multimedia

• CoolPlayer
• Easy Image Modifier
• SharePod
• Audacity
• CDex
• GIMP
• VirtualDub
• VLC Player
• AndreaMosaic
• Avidemux
• Camstudio
• Fotografix
• Snaptimer
• Splayer

So voice out in the comments with your suggestions and you could win a free MakeUseOf t-shirt!

You may not have heard of a couple of these browsers, but each and every one brings a unique benefit to your portable arsenal. Don’t let the fact that you may not have heard of them stand in the way of finding your new favorite browser.

Avant Browser

We’ve already covered a nice and in-depth review of the Avant browser, but it’s time to rehash the software now that an official portable version is readily available on their official website.

Avant is like a souped-up version of Internet Explorer. One of the main differences is how well Avant handles Flash, in comparison. Avant is only a little slower than the current Firefox build, which puts it plenty ahead of IE’s speed. It’s also got a ton of features built in, like ways to disable on-page sound, scripting, and animations right out of the box.

You can download the official portable version here.

Pale Moon

What Avant is to Internet Explorer, Pale Moon strives to be alongside Firefox. Pale Moon is an alternative, slim-downed version of the Firefox browser that is built on Firefox’s official source code. The browser has been around for years and has been proven to use less memory than the original Firefox without the user being able to notice much difference alongside the powerhouse browser that Mozilla has on their hands.

You can download Pale Moon’s official portable release from this page.

Browzar

Browzar has a distinct advantage over the rest on this list in respect that the official build of the original browser itself is portable. Browzar leaves an incredibly small fingerprint and is one of the most secure and easy-to-use browsers that I’ve used right from a flash drive.

While it does lack somethings in the features category, Browzar can’t be beaten when you’re looking for something to jump on and jump right off with. Browzar will even clear every single bit of sensitive, session-specific data after closing.

You can download it here.

Opera@USB

I decided to save the best for last. While Opera may already be my favorite official browser in the first place, it is not the Opera team who developed this third-party portable port. Nonetheless, it’s flawless. It’ll even update alongside released Opera versions and still maintain it’s portable status.

Other than that, there’s really not too much more to explain about Opera@USB. It is simply Opera in a portable package. Give Opera a shot just for a few days and I promise you’ll start to fall in love a little. You can click here to download Opera@USB.

Though unheard of and maybe even a little obscure, these portable gems will help put your flash drive on the right track. If you enjoyed this list, check out 100 other portable applications that you may enjoy. Shoot me a line about any of these in the comments.

DesktopSnowOK is an incredibly lightweight, portable, no-installation-required piece of software that can turn your Windows desktop or laptop from summer in Florida to winter in Colorado in just a second. Screensavers aren’t cool any more. We’re past the days of Christmas lights on your desktop screensaver or Bonzi-esque, Santa’s helper elf desktop “pets.” Let’s put you in the middle of a calm snowfall right at your desk.

SoftwareOK.com has released this little gem of software compatible with every single version of Windows. The download is a whopping 52KB and “installation” is as easy as unzipping the archive onto your desktop. Better yet, why not toss this in your Dropbox and have it sync with all of your devices?

After decompressing the archive, open the application.

Immediately, you’ll notice a lot of configurable options. You’re able to change the number of flakes, the transparency, speed, texture and size, and optional deactivation methods if you don’t want the snow bugging you while you’re browsing. The snowflakes show not only on your Windows desktop, but on every other window. You can even send the software to your tray by clicking the To-Tray button at the bottom.

The software uses under 7000 K in memory, but the faster and more snowflakes you begin to use, the more CPU usage you’ll have to dedicate towards the application. Here’s how the effect looks on a few different backgrounds and settings:

Here’s a quick rundown on DesktopSnowOK’s key features for you to review:

• Portable application that requires no hard installation and is incredibly small in size
• Activate or deactivate snowflakes within the program itself
• Docking within the system tray
• Ability to define the speed, number of snowflakes, their texture, and their transparency
• Option to deactivate snow by mouse or keyboard movement

If you are interested in downloading and running this software, here’s a quick little tutorial on how to get everything going smoothly:

• Go to the DesktopSnowOK website
• Click on “Download (57 KB)“
• Download the .ZIP archive, which will contain all of the files necessary to run DesktopSnowOK
• Run the binary application file included in the archive

From there, personalize and tweak the software to your particular liking. If you leave the application altogether or allow it to dock in your system tray, you configuration will still remain the same. Remember, running a very high number of snowflakes or a very large texture graphic file can result in hardware performance issues. If you’re on an older laptop, let me just recommend that you do very few flakes and you keep them nice and small. An application like this shouldn’t be a performance risk so try to keep it simple.

If that’s not enough to kick your PC into Christmas mode, check out these eight sites to find free Christmas music. Still stuck on screensavers and other desktop animations? We’ve covered those, too!

Linux Live USB Creator, a similar program, can help create live USB drives, but it only works on Windows. Live USB Install works on both Windows and Linux, and is incredibly simple to use. Just pick which version of Linux you want to use and which drive you’d like to install it to. Your software will be downloaded and installed, and you will soon be able to live a contented life involving the booting of Linux from a USB disk.

If this sounds complicated, don’t worry: it isn’t. Your disk will be up and running in no time.

Using Live USB

The interface couldn’t be much friendlier, inviting you to pick what version of Linux you’d like to install. If you’ve already downloaded an ISO file, great. You can point Live USB towards it to create your live USB disk. If you already have a Linux CD, that’s also great – you can use that as a source too.

If you don’t have either though, you can simply click a version of Linux and Live USB will download it for you. You’ll need to scroll through a rather long list to do so:

Not sure where to start? Ubuntu, Fedora and Linux Mint are all good options if you’re looking for a general Linux experience. You’ll also need to pick which version you want. Not sure what this means? Just pick the most recent version, because that’s probably what you want.

Once you’ve figured out what you want to install, it’s time to figure out where you want to install it. Insert your flash drive and pick it from the menu:

If you can’t see your drive, hit “Refresh“. It will show up.

Persistent Installation

You can, if you want, create a “persistent” installation of Ubuntu and other Debian-based distributions. What does this mean? Software you install and documents you create after booting this thumb drive will stay on your thumb drive. It’s a virtual computer on a drive!

Download Now!

Ready to try this out? If so, head over to the Live USB download page. You’ll find a DEB package there for Ubuntu and source code for other Linux distributions. You’ll also find the Windows download.

Conclusion

This program is easy to use and works well. I plan on using it to try out a variety of Linux distros in the months to come.

But, as always, I want to know – how did this program work for you? Fill me in the comments below; I’ll be around to answer questions.

This is a relative newcomer, only at version 1.0, released just a few weeks ago. It’s free, tiny, and pretty easy to understand.

The Language Menu

Unless you speak German, this is where you’re going to want to head first. The app starts in German by default, but English comes preinstalled, and it takes just a single click to change over to it (the app doesn’t even need to restart). Once you’ve done that, it’s time to look at the rest of the interface.

System Cleanup

DrivePurge is sensibly divided into four tabs, which we’ll be looking at in order. The first tab is System Cleanup. At first, the details pane is blank, because DrivePurge doesn’t have any recommendations. You need to check the menu entries you want DrivePurge to analyze (all entries, for me), and then click Analyze. You’ll get a progress bar, and at the end of the process, DrivePurge shows a list of recommendations similar to the one you get with CCleaner and just about every other system cleaner:

Again, nothing special, but it’s sensibly laid out and you can see how much space everything takes. The only thing really missing is a way to sort the list by size. Once you’re done, click Cleanup, and get one last prompt:

It would have been nice if the app showed what exactly it intends to clean up and let you confirm or deny on an individual basis. As it is, it just cleans everything the scan found. The “selected files” refers to your initial selection before scanning. Once the scan is done, anything that came up is cleaned. This is a bit of a gotcha; still, I was brave, bit the bullet and had DrivePurge clean my drive. The computer did not explode, nor did it BSOD or did anything weird (I tested this on my “real” computer, not on a VM).

As always, you need to be careful with system cleaning applications, and make sure you really know what you’re doing before you go around deleting stuff with abandon. You can easily damage your system when trying to clean it up.

Drive Cleanup

This app is called DrivePurge, so it would only make sense if it had a feature for cleaning up the hard drive. So:

You select a drive, select a bunch of file types that are usually not needed, and then analyze it. This part takes some time, particularly if you have lots of files.  Let’s see what it finds on my C drive.

Not so much, really. Just 71MB of crud, but that’s still something. And of course, this is really computer-dependent – on some systems you may find considerably more junk files. Again, be careful with this one. I deleted one too many temporary files when testing the app, and messed up this very post (which I’m writing in Windows Live Writer), as well as the spell checker. Not the app’s fault, but you need to really think about whether or not you want to delete something (and the app can definitely be a bit more granular).

User Tracks Cleanup

This tab gives you a long list of apps that the program can check for traces. These are mainly things like lists of recently used files, Flash cookies, and so on. Here, the fact that the analysis is not detailed does get in the way. For example, I might want to delete some Flash cookies, but not all. I found no way of selectively doing that with DrivePurge, at least not in this early version.

Report

This tab is basically good for a sense of accomplishment. It looks like this:

So you can see exactly what the app has been cleaning, and when.

Final Thoughts

DrivePurge may not be as comprehensive as CCleaner or as pretty as Soluto, but it’s lightweight, portable, and free. I think this is an app that’s starting out on the right foot, and has a bright future ahead of it. What do you think?

Over the years, system administrators have come up with various tricks to accomplish this task. Tim wrote about a few useful ways that people use Windows Task Scheduler to launch various jobs, and Varun covered a series of useful USB apps that can come in handy. In this article, I’m going to cover a few USB auto-launch techniques that administrators have used. You might have been told that it’s impossible to auto-launch applications on your USB card on your Windows 7 computer. I’m here to show you that it is not true.

How You Used to Auto-Launch USB Apps

For years, at least since Windows 2000, but probably even earlier, system administrators have used the autorun.inf technique to autostart applications on a USB memory stick just like the autorun feature worked on computer CDs.

The autorun.inf file could be as complicated or as simple as you liked. The simplest form was as follows:

[autorun]
icon=mypic.ico
open=start-zim.bat
action=Click “OK” to start your apps!

All you would need is the icon image and the batch job available, and the moment you inserted your USB stick into a computer running an OS like Windows XP, you would see the following options automatically pop up.

Just click OK and you’re good to go. You can launch a batch job that starts all of the apps that you want, and you essentially have a customized way to open up all of your apps in an automated way that saves a lot of time.

This was somewhat limiting, because you had that pop-up prompt. I’ve heard that there were ways to get around the pop-up that involved a little bit of tweaking/hacking, but in doing so you introduce the ability to hack any computer with some virus simply by inserting a USB stick. Microsoft caught on to this in Windows 7 and completely disabled the USB functionality of autorun.inf in that operating system. Future updates of Windows XP also disabled that feature. So what’s a system admin to do?

Launching Apps Automatically From Your USB Stick

Well, where there’s a will there’s a way. And yes, there is a way to launch a program just by inserting your USB stick into a Windows 7 PC.

The first thing you’re going to want to do is install AutoIT, which Guy covered a while back. AutoIT is a very cool scripting language that lets you compile those scripts into exec programs that you can distribute to any PC. The download includes an editor as well as the converter software.

The great thing about AutoIT scripts is that there are lots of brilliant people out there creating scripts for a long list of tasks. The following script is what you use to detect whether a USB stick has been inserted into a port.

$DBT_DEVICEARRIVAL = "0x00008000"

 $WM_DEVICECHANGE = 0x0219

 GUICreate("")

 GUIRegisterMsg($WM_DEVICECHANGE , "MyFunc")

 Func MyFunc($hWndGUI, $MsgID, $WParam, $LParam)

 If $WParam == $DBT_DEVICEARRIVAL Then

MsgBox(4096, "Info", "My Drive has been Inserted, Backup My Files!")

 EndIf

 EndFunc

 While 1

 $GuiMsg = GUIGetMsg()

 WEnd

That script will recognize a “device change”, and for a USB stick it will launch a message box, as shown here.

Now, think about that. If this script will recognize a USB stick in order to launch a message, then it can be slightly modified to launch a program instead. So, in order to do this, I took the script above and replaced the MsgBox command with the following line:

Run ("F:\System\Apps\ZimWiki\Zim Desktop Wiki\start-zim.cmd")

What this does is senses when I’ve plugged in my USB stick, and then automatically launches the Zim Wiki app I have on my USB stick that I use to organize and monitor my writing work.

Now we have a way to auto-launch a program just by inserting the USB stick. However, let’s take it a step further and launch a whole collection of apps by launching a batch job on your USB card called startapps.bat that launches all the programs you want for that particular stick.

START "" F:\System\Apps\ZimWiki\Zim_Desktop_Wiki\start-zim.cmd

START "" C:\Users\Owner\MUO_STORY_IDEAS\MUO_STORY_IDEAS.txt

START "" FIREFOX.EXE http://www.makeuseof.com/wp-admin

What’s the point of this? The point is that now you can have a unique “startapps.bat” script for various USB sticks. One might be for your school work, in which case you’d open your class webpage, a word processor and maybe a spreadsheet for the class. Another might be for your work as a help desk tech, where it would auto-launch PC support utilities and your favorite tech website (MUO of course).

The only catch is this – the EXE file you create with the AutoIT script has to be running on every PC that you want the auto-launch to occur on. This satisfies the Windows 7 security demands. Just open the AutoIT script above, and compile and build the script to create your EXE file. Put that EXE in the Startup folder of the computers you use most often.

If the script is running, you’ll see the following Icon in the task bar.

This setup is great because there’s no prompt at all – just insert your USB stick and all of your required apps will just launch automatically.

Give the script a try and see if you can get this setup working with your own USB stick. Do you like this approach? Any tips for how to improve it? Share your insight in the comments section below.

ramasamy chidambaram