The Cleaner was back in the days one of the few solid programs to clean malicious software from a Windows computer system. It somehow seems to have lost its appeal to many users even though the developer’s claim that it is the fastest anti-virus solution with best virus detection rates available for the Windows operating system.
The Cleaner is an antivirus software, not a suite which means it does not offer a firewall, email spam scanning or any of the other modules that security suites offer. It can therefor be best compared to other standalone antivirus solutions such as AVG 9 or Avast.
The developers have divided the program into a scanner and a resident program, both highly compatibly with other antivirus solutions installed on the computer system. The program uses a database of malicious software plus advanced heuristics to detect known and unknown threats on a computer system.
The Giveaway of the Day edition does not offer the TCActive module that monitors processes in the background. This version of The Cleaner is therefor only suitable for scanning the computer system for malicious software.
TCActive is available in the program directory despite the help file claiming that it is only available in retail versions of the security program. It needs to be started manually and will run in the background afterwards.
The tab driven program is easy to use. The user should start by clicking on the Update tab to update the program’s database, something that does not seem to be handled automatically by the antivirus software.
The scan tab provides the means to perform a smart scan that will only scan popular locations for malware or full scan which will scan everything on the hard drives selected by the user.
The only other options provided are to change the heuristics level from relaxed to paranoid in a slider, to whitelist files so that they are not scanned by the software and to take a look at reports and the log.
The Cleaner in this regard is therefor a solid addition to any security setup a user might already have installed on the computer system. The lack of the background process monitor make it not suitable as the only antivirus program on the system.
Installation of The Cleaner
Installation is straightforward. Just execute the setup.exe after extracting the files to the local computer system. The serial number for The Cleaner is located in the readme file that is part of the zip file. The program can be registered after the first startup. A restart of the software is required afterwards.
Positive
- Fast Scan
- Compatible with other antivirus software and security suites
- Background monitoring with TCActive
Negative
No TCActive module means no background monitoring- Updates have to be initiated manually
The Cleaner, well the crippled version without TCActive, is available for free at the Giveaway of the Day website. The developer’s website is accessible here.
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* Updates have to be initiated manually
The Cleaner, well the crippled version without TCActive, is available for free at the Giveaway of the Day website. The developer’s website is accessible here.”
The version on Giveaway of the Day is the full version. You just have to activate it with the given registration code. You can also have it update automatically by following the directions in the FAQ found here: http://www.moosoft.com/customer-service
Hi, you corrected some mistakes but the biggest still remains.
Its not an antivirus. Its intended to protect against other malwares which are not viruses.