The scanning function and the quality of its work is the aspect on which the serious attention of all users is focused when choosing a suitable antivirus vendor. Scanning helps to instantly detect a malicious file on your system, and the best ones can do this before the virus even gets on your system. But what are online scanners and will they be useful to you? In this article, we will review ESET Online Scanner and examine its features so that you can answer this question for yourself.
What is ESET Online Scanner?
ESET Online Scanner is a free tool available for Windows users that allows users to run a one-time scan of their system for vulnerabilities or potential threats. The main advantage of this device is that it can be run regardless of the antivirus you are using, it is perfectly compatible with any of them and does not interfere with them in any way.
ESET Online Scanner is also supported on all versions of Windows, even the latest ones. The program is very light in weight and only takes up about 6 megabytes of memory on your device, and you need administrator rights to activate it.
ESET Online Scanner – how does it work?
After starting the program, the main settings page will open in front of you, where you can control parameters such as:
- Activate the function of detecting potentially suspicious or unwanted applications
- Check archived files
- Activation of the special Anti-Stealth technology
- Automatically destroying malware
- Selective scanning of specific files, folders, etc.
Note that not all the functions listed above are set to activate automatically. You may leave some of them disabled or – on the contrary – enabled. Maybe not all users will be affected by the auto-removal function as some prefer to leave everything under their control to avoid false positives and erroneously putting an important file into isolation. This is not uncommon, especially if features such as “detect potentially unsafe applications” remain active.
The scanning process itself varies from device to device, depending on the size of your drive, the larger it is the faster the scanning process and the version of Windows. On a 256GB drive, this process takes about half an hour.
The program gives you all the data you need to see during the scan, including a progress bar, total scan time, all files that have been analyzed, and of course corrupted and virus-infected files.
Once malicious files have been detected you can do the following: either isolate them in a special space or delete them immediately. In both cases, they will no longer pose any threat to you. All data can be copied or saved to a text file.
The program interface is not very impressive as you will have to manually interact with the scanning results to fully trace the path and the name of the malicious file. Another disadvantage is that you will not be able to search for any information about it on the internet.
Overall, the program is very simple and practical and you can use it to make sure your system is secure and to double-check it again. The principle of its work is almost no different from the scanners of other well-known anti-viruses such as Kaspersky or Dr.Web.