We have taken a look at Ashampoo programs before, and have been impressed with the performance. However, the problem has always been that the programs aren’t free. In fact, they usually cost upwards of $30. Granted sometimes there are promotions, but the Ashampoo antivirus programs have been conveniently left out of them. Anyways, come along to today and I found out that Ashampoo has released their first free antivirus called Virus QuickScan. The program is an on demand scanner that attempts to detect threats via the cloud. The unfortunate part about the scanner is that it doesn’t have a real time shield and needs to be run every time one wants to detect viruses.
The installation of Ashampoo Virus Quickscan was easy because there really isn’t one. Simply download the executable and start the scanner. The download is a small 1 megabyte in size and the installation less install means that it can be transferred to computer to computer for fast scans.
Ashampoo appears to scan for direct malware traces and processes. While these are the most common and troublesome areas for malware infection, it seems to leave out file based scans. The first scan scanned 53,164 malware traces and 243 processes. The program also looks for cookies but I deleted them all before the scan and zero were detected. Once the scan was finished, there was an option to Clean/Protect. The link launches the browser and actually starts at an Emsisoft URL . It appears that Ashampoo utilizes a form of Emsisoft technology in their scanners and therefore is an affiliate of Ashampoo. Unfortunately, to remove malware one has to install the trial version of Anti-Malware.
The full system scan finished in a quick 37 seconds and didn’t detect any malware on the test system. There is a handy log file which displays what was scan and where the items that may have been detected are found. The initial launch of the program starts the “Ashampoo_virus_quickscan.exe†process which uses 6.7 megabytes of RAM. Once a scan is started, the process uses anywhere from 12 to 23 megabytes of RAM and about 13 percent CPU usage.
I think Quick Scan needs some improvement before it can be recommended. The problem is there are many other free antivirus that offer more functionality. It needs more features like a built-in cleaning engine, the ability to scan the registry, and perhaps trusted files based scanning. However, it’s a start and I hope to see more free programs from Ashampoo in the future.
