NoVirusThanks Malware Remover – Fast And Free

By: Karan Goel | 13th July 2010

Are you a regular user of Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware like me? I use it twice to thrice daily to scan my machine, and remove any suspicious stuff.

The only disadvantage of MBAM is that the full scan takes a lot of time. Now, I’ve started using a faster alternative by NoVirusThanks.

You start by downloading the free malware remover from here. It is 1.2MB and downloads pretty quickly.

It requires Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5. Please install it before the installation if you do not already have it. You can grab the .Net Framework from here if you need it. After the quick installation you will need to launch the application from your start menu.

The authors describe the free malware remover as follows:

NoVirusThanks Malware Remover is an application designed to detect and remove specific malware, trojans, worms and other malicious threats that can damage your computer. It includes also the ability to remove rogue software, spyware and adware. Scanning time is very fast and does not use or need much memory even with other high-resource programs are running.

Before starting the scan, we need to configure the app. Go to the Settings tab.

In the general tab we have three options. The first one that reduces the applications memory usage will indeed use less resources but your scan will take longer. This is better on slower (older) machines. Work in background will minimize the application to a system tray icon and the final option I feel is a must after installation. Auto update database before scan will automatically download the newest update before it starts scanning. This is a no-brainer.

For the scan settings, I like to keep the following settings:

The scan type I would leave on quick scan unless you will be leaving the machine for a long period of time.

If you did not check the check box to automatically update the database before scanning you will need to go to the update tab and manually update the definitions like so:

Now, to scan the system, go to the scan tab, and press the start button.

And then it will start scanning. As it finds suspicious files it will list them in the grid:

Conclusion

When it is complete hopefully you are all clean like I was but if not simply hit the remove button to start the removal procedure. My scan on a 500GB SATA drive took about 17 minutes (I’m on a powerful Mac using Parallels).

What do you think of NoVirusThanks? Do you have another free malware remover that you use? Let us know in the comments.