In our Resource Review section, I aim to highlight options available free of charge or at very low cost to individuals and nonprofits. The purpose here is not to evangelize certain products or tear apart others; rather it is to increase awareness of and knowledge regarding alternative IT solutions. Also, these reviews should be accessible to the non-technical individual, as much as possible. (A secondary aim is to keep these reviews reasonably short.)

Recently, I sat down with a gentleman from a local nonprofit to discuss his organization’s technological needs and wants. Among other things, I noted that the organization did not run any antivirus software. As with so many other nonprofits, resources were extremely limited, and he could not justify antivirus software and subscription costs, even at discounted prices.

Instead, he had decided on a practice of wiping out entire machines should any problems arise. As these machines are used by students in a lab situation, there’s no data loss concern. When a machine developed issues he would simply restore the machine from a pristine image; essentially restoring all the software to “like new.”

First of all, let me say that creating utilizing “clean slate” images (often referred to as “Ghosting”) for quick restore is an excellent practice and can save a lot of time recovering from serious software crashes. However, very importantly, the practice of re-imaging is not a viable antivirus solution. Here are a few reasons why:

1. If caught early, viruses are often nothing more than minor nuisances and can be quickly and easy removed with no harm done. Restoring a system is relatively quick (probably under an hour), but it is still a waste of time if removing a single file solves the problem.
2. Re-imaging a machine may not actually kill the virus where it lives. Viruses can infect, for example, the Master Boot Record of a hard drive, which may or may not be cleansed when re-imaging. By their nature, viruses are often rather wily.
3. Most importantly, a virus may be living on your PC, multiplying, and spreading across many, many computers long before you notice any system troubles at all. It is irresponsible to allow a virus to run rampant until you notice something amiss; be a good ‘net citizen.
4. Antivirus solutions are available free of charge, so there’s no excuse!

ClamWin: The Free, Open Source Antivirus

ClamWin is a free Antivirus for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP and 2003. As of this writing, version .88.4 is current. It is licensed under the GNU GPL, and you may legally download and install the software free of charge. There are no subscription fees for keeping ClamWin up-to-date.

While this is not an appropriate forum for detailed installation instructions, I will briefly state that installation is very simple, and should take less than 5 minutes. In a very small nutshell, you must first download ClamWin from the web. Visit http://www.clamwin.com/ for the most current version. Next, run the downloaded installer and click “Next” and handful of times. Finally, reboot.

As you restart the computer, you should briefly see a splash screen letting you know ClamWin is started. Also, you should have a new icon in your tray (the small area near the clock) which resembles a circle cut into quarters. As with any good virus scanner, that’s really all you should see most of the time.

ClamWin includes options for manually and automatically updating virus definitions and also for manually and automatically scanning your disks. Updates take only a few seconds over a decent Internet connection, but scans can take a rather long time. I would suggest scheduling disk scans for when you’ll be away from your desk, such as a regular lunch hour or after leaving for the day (assuming you don’t shut off your PC when you leave).

ClamWin is also capable of integrating with Outlook to scan incoming email. However, an important limitation of ClamWin is that it does not offer real-time virus scanning. This means that files will be scanned only if you right-click the icon and select “Scan” or during a scheduled/manual disk scan.

I have been running ClamWin on my office Windows XP machine for the last few months. In that time, it has detected and eliminated a handful of viruses, and, as far as I know, I’ve had no viral issues. Originally, I installed ClamWin because Norton Antivirus went haywire, but I’ve kept it because it sits quietly in the background and just works.

If you are presently running Norton, McAfee, or another antivirus solution and are happy with it, I would generally not suggest making a switch to ClamWin. For one thing, there’s no reason to mess with a working solution. More importantly, Norton and McAfee antivirus products are often bundled with Firewalls, Anti-Spyware software, and other security packages -- ClamWin only provides antivirus services. However, if you are running without any virus protection at work or home, are unhappy with your current solution, or are tired of subscription fees, ClamWin provides a viable antivirus product that is both easy to use and available completely free of charge.

For further reading, please consider:

http://www.clamwin.com/ -- the official ClamWin webpage

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/clamwin_test/ -- installation and review

http://www.spcug.org/reviews/0409_02.htm -- a short review