Here is a list of best free portable antivirus software for Windows. You can use these USB antivirus software from any portable storage device as none of the software require installation. These software help you protect your computer from viruses, malware, trojan, worms, spyware, etc. In most software, you get options to scan the whole system at once or some specific drive, folder, file, etc. After the scan, each software provides a detailed report about the number of scanned files, detected threats, neutralized threats, etc.
In some portable antiviruses, you get a really useful feature named quarantine that comes in handy when some important file might get infected by a virus. By using quarantine, you can restore back all or some of the selected files back to the system. Besides this, you can find various other features which are software specific. In most cases, portable antivirus freeware are as good as non-portable software, but one feature that almost every portable software lacks is real-time protection. Nowadays real-time protection is really important because any virus can enter your system from the internet. Still, you can carry these software in a portable device and scan your PC for viruses by connecting the device to the system.
My Favorite Portable Antivirus Software For Windows:
Comodo Cleaning Essential is my favorite portable antivirus because it provides various advanced security features along with simple virus protection. Plus, it comes with a real-time safety verdict feature that most portable antivirus software lack. It is one of the best portable antivirus software.
Comodo Cleaning Essential
Comodo Cleaning Essential is a free portable antivirus software for Windows. You can use this antivirus from any portable USB drive as it does not require installation to work. This portable software provides a complete protection from various types of malware like viruses, rootkits, hidden files, malicious registry keys, etc.
This portable antivirus freeware has many built-in protection features such as:
- Protection from untrusted Processes: It automatically identifies every untrusted process running on an endpoint which you can manually terminate with a single click.
- Forensic level stats and graphs: It provides detailed graphs and stats about various internal processes and resource usage which you can easily analyze and check which processes use maximum resources.
- Endpoints protection: It provides complete protection from threats which can enter to your system through network endpoints.
- Comodo cloud scanners: This feature provides real-time safety verdicts about various unknown processes.
- Killswitch: It uses Comodo’s whitelist database to isolate or terminate untrusted processes with an extremely high level of accuracy.
To perform scans manually, you can use any of the three options named smart scan, full scan, and custom scan. Smart scan only scans those areas of the system that are most likely to be attacked by viruses. In Full Scan, this software scans every file and folder of the system to find viruses. Custom scan option lets you manually choose which part of the system you want to scan.
In my opinion, Comodo Cleaning Essential is the best portable antivirus software.
Nortan Power Eraser
Norton Power Eraser is a portable and powerful antivirus software for Windows. This antivirus is used to delete deeply embedded and difficult to detect viruses which traditional virus scanning is not able to detect.
Through this antivirus, you can scan the whole system at once by using its scan for risks option. It will detect and delete all the deeply embedded viruses of the system. As this feature is pretty aggressive, so there is a slight possibility that it might delete some important files or programs. To protect you from losing the important data or files, this software features a dedicated undo previous fix option that restores back all the deleted files during the system scan.
In this portable antivirus, you also get various scanning options, using which you can perform reputation scan (to check file or folders reputation like good, fair, or bad.), system scan (to perform standard power scan), Multi-boot scan (to perform scan on a specified Windows OS when working on a multiple Windows environment).
This software is also quite good at finding all the unwanted programs of the system. Its unwanted application scan option helps you to find out all the unnecessary or potentially harmful application. Overall, it is another one of the best portable antivirus software.
McAfee Stinger
McAfee Stinger is a standalone and portable antivirus software for Windows. This portable software can scan and remove viruses, rootkits, malware, etc. Still, this standalone antivirus is not a replacement for a full or complete antivirus software. It only scans the system for a specific list of threats. You can view the list of all threats that this software is aiming to find from the Advanced > Threat List menu.
To perform a quick scan, just press the scan button. The quick scan by default targets those parts or sectors of a system where most of the viruses and threats are known to reside. Though, you can customize the scan behavior from the settings menu. Through settings menu, you can vary four parameters for scan named scan targets (registry, rootkits, boot sector, etc.), scan options (subsidiaries, inside archives, and report applications), on threat detection (repair, report, and rename), and GTI sensitivity (high, low, medium, etc.).
After the scan, this software can either remove, repair, or move threats to quarantine according to the user-defined “on threat detection” setting. If detected threats move to quarantine, then you have one more option to restore important data or files which get deleted or stopped working after the scan.
Dr.Web Cureit!
Dr.Web Cureit! is another free and portable antivirus software for Windows. It works like a USB antivirus software that you can use from any portable USB device without installing.
This portable antivirus provides complete protection from various types of viruses, rootkits, trojan horses, spyware, and other malicious objects. In it, you can scan the whole system at once or scan a particular directory or folder. All the detected viruses by default move to quarantine. From its quarantine manager, you can restore quarantined files or folders or you can completely remove the detected threats manually. Though, you can also set an “automatic after scan” action to cure mode that enables this antivirus to delete all the detected threats immediately. Besides cure, you can also set some other after scan actions like sound alert, turn off PC after scanning, etc.
This freeware has one more interesting feature in its settings menu named exclusion. This exclusion feature comes in handy as it allows you to exclude important files, folders, programs, etc., that you do not want to scan.
ClamWin Portable
ClamWin Portable is a free and open source antivirus software for Windows. This antivirus comes in a portable package that allows you to place and use this antivirus from any portable storage device.
This software is perfectly capable of detecting and removing viruses and spyware of various types. Though, it does not provide any type of real-time protection which is normal with most of the portable antivirus software. Still, you can manually scan a complete drive, folders, or files at a time. It just doesn’t remove viruses from hard drives, but also from RAM or primary memory. It has a dedicated scan computer memory for viruses option to scan and unload all the viruses or threats containing programs from the RAM.
Some other interesting stats and features of this software are:
- Higher detection rate for spyware and viruses.
- Regular and automatic virus database updates.
- Standalone virus scanner.
- Scanning scheduler.
In general, it is quite a handy and powerful portable antivirus software for protecting PC from virus and other malicious programs.
Spybot – Search & Destroy
Spybot – Search & Destroy is yet another free and portable antivirus software for Windows. This portable software is mainly used to detect and remove malware and spyware from PC. But, you can also use it to clean usage tracks and to fix registry issues.
When you launch this software, it will ask you to perform whitelist scan. This scan creates a list of programs which are known to be safe. The main aim of this scan is to reduce the system scanning time in future as it will not scan all the whitelist software in future. After whitelist scan, you can manually perform full system scan or some specific file or folder scan to neutralize the threats and viruses. Detected threats will automatically be moved to quarantine zone, from where they will not able to affect the system in a negative way. If some important file or program gets blocked or deleted after the system scan, you can restore back the data using quarantine menu.
Immunization is another useful feature of this antivirus that allows you to immunize PC from various types of spyware. This option basically changes various settings of native browser like cookies, malware installations, ActiveX, bad websites, etc. to protect PC from spyware. Some other handy features of this antivirus are secure shredder, system repair, report creator, startup tools, etc.
Overall, it is a simple as well as feature-rich antivirus software that will help you to secure your PC from virus threats.
Emsisoft Emergency Kit
Emsisoft Emergency Kit is another free and portable antivirus software for Windows. In the portable package of Emsisoft Emergency Kit, you get two separate programs namely, Emsisoft Emergency Kit Scanner and Emsisoft Commandline Scanner. Basically, both programs are same but Emergency Kit Scanner has GUI while Commandline Scanner does not. This portable antivirus package will protect your PC from all types of viruses. Plus, its timely updates will secure your system from newly introduced viruses as well.
In Emsisoft Emergency Kit Scanner, you can perform a quick scan, malware scan, and custom scan with ease as it has GUI. After the scan, it sends all the detected viruses, rootkits, etc., to quarantine from where you can permanently delete viruses or leave infected files to quarantine. All the details about viruses and their severity can be viewed from the logs tab.
If you want to scan PC using command line, then launch Emsisoft Commandline Scanner and type a2cmd.exe. Next, you will see a help page on command line describing all available parameters. You can use commands of help page to scan different parts of the system. EX: c:\ with Memory, Traces (Registry) scan enabled, and archive support active can be written in CMD as a2cmd.exe /f=”c:\” /m /t /a /q=”c:\quarantine\. After the scan, all detected threats will automatically be moved to quarantine.
Panda Cloud Cleaner
Panda Cloud Cleaner is the next free portable antivirus software for Windows in this list. It is a straightforward software that mainly scans PC to find malware. On its main interface, you get only one option named scan to start full PC scan. After the scan, it shows three categories of results namely, malware, unknown files & suspicious policies, and system cleaning. Details like number of scanned files, number of deleted or cleaned files, and detected viruses are also provided by it. In it, you do not get options like quarantine.
This portable antivirus also provides two advanced options that might be useful namely, kill all processes (it kills all the running processes of the system) and unlock files (it unlocks those files which get locked due to some malware).
This software may not have various features like other antivirus software; still, it performs its basic task (virus protection) brilliantly and quickly which matters the most.