Hello,

I was recommended to this Anti-Virus by a friend and (so far) looking at all the features, it makes me wonder why people pay top dollar instead of just coming here. Anyway, I'm from Australia and usually I have great net speed but the download link provided is just abysmally slow for me (90 minutes for 85MB). Would it be possible to add additional mirrors?

ClamWin is a small project and it depends upon Source Forge for hosting, so it has to live with that. You could try downloading ClamWin from this location at https://sourceforge.net/projects/clamwin/files/clamwin/ on the web. The latest version is .98.4, so get that. If that is too slow, I suggest you wait until maybe 3 am or so (your time) to see if the download goes faster then.

ClamWin uses the scan engine/virus signatures provided by the Clam AV project for Linux and ports it over to Windows. The lead ClamWin developer is from Melbourne! Be aware that ClamWin is not a real-time antivirus. It is only an on-demand scanner that scans for viruses when you tell it to--either manually or via a scheduled scan. Because of this, if you are on the web a lot, it is recommended that you employ a real-time scanner (some good free ones are Microsoft Security Essentials for Win XP and above, Windows Defender on Windows 8, and Panda Free Cloud) and employ ClamWin as backup scanner. If you have a Windows 98 computer, look into the free front-end for ClamWin developed by the Clam Sentinel Project (not related to ClamWin however).

Regards,

I just installed .98.4.1 and it took less then a minute to download. Sometimes servers update or get overloaded which causes download speeds to drop to the floor. It usual happens to me on every website I go. Try downloading again to see if the speeds have changed. Also, having a lot of people download at the same time will also cause speeds to drop. As GuitarBob mentioned, really late at night is usually the best time to download. Hope this helps you.

I use ClamWin for long time both on Windows 98 and Windows XP computers. I even tried some other AV products based on Clam AV signatures like Moon Secure AV (not live anymore), CS Antivirus and Clam Sentinel. This is my experience...I still use Clam Sentinel although I wish it is better product but it is what it is and adding real-time protection based on Clam engine is very good idea, Moon Secure would be great had they ever finished it - awesome idea but naturally resource hog and had problem with constantly growing internal database of your HDD files signatures, CS Antivirus never got to be installed on my computer although it seemed to be better solution then ClamWin+ClamSentinel combo but alas when I uploaded installation file to virustotal there was a disappointment in the results - I really can not waste time checking was that false positive or not so no CS Antivirus for me. I use Panda Free Cloud on one computer with Windows XP OS together with ClamWin+ClamSentinel with no issues so far. I have other computer with Windows XP also where today I had weird experience. Upon notification about new ClamWin 0.98.4.1 I downloaded it and attempted installation. Believe it or not Microsoft Security Essentials has some issues with it and reported that it cleaned the files that I see in its report to belong to some temporary ClamWin files. Is something gone wrong? If it is what could it be? Should I attempt fresh download and re-install ClamWin? Should Microsoft Security Essentials be turned off during upgrade/installation? Just for the sake of argument let it be noted that I previously tried to run ClamWin+ClamSentinel with Windows Defender under XP and it runed just fine although I expected troubles. After I installed Microsoft Security Essentials it started to run at start-up and Windows Defender become just on-demand scanner. I am fine with that as Defender is for Windows 8 type of OS anyway.
About Clam signatures download...sometimes local universities or other grids make repositories of Clam signatures for their own use in order not to clog download to oversea servers so I would try to find one in Australia near this user.

I've never used ClamWin with Security Essentials on Win XP. I have only used it on Vista and Windows 8 (as Windows Defender). It runs fine on them but I have some problems on Win 8.1 due to admin restrictions, which appear permanent/unsolveable at the present, although it works okay.

Seurity Essentials is a good AV and is probably the best at minimizing false positives (FP). Nevertheless, FPs happen sometimes with any AV. It's detections are usually for real and its false positives are few. If you downloaded ClamWin from the official ClamWin site, the files are clean. What has probably happened is that Security Essentials triggered a detection on a ClamWin temp file--which can contain virus signatures that other AVs can recognize as infected. The temp files are used in ClamWin's scanning process and may not be deleted until some time later.

Let me suggest this: exclude clamtmp file types from Security Essentials, and also exclude every .exe file in the ClamWin bin directory as excluded processes. You might also want to exclude the Security Esentials program and data folders from ClamWin and/or Clam Sentinel.

Clam Sentinel uses common sense heuristics to detect suspicious files. Unfortunately, "good" files can also be heavily packed, contain double extensions, fail to be properly r3egistered with the Windows OS, hide resources, and have other characteristics that appear similar to some malware files. This is especially true with dll files--many times all the developer cares about is using them to install/run his program and fails to use good programming practices. There is some advice on minimizing false positives in the Simple Guide to Clam Sentinel.

Regards,

I understood all you wrote here. To bad that you can not help me with my problem as we do not have same OS and software but still support matters and I hope someone who had same issues will stumble upon this post. I will try to resolve this issue later tonight anyway through trial&error approach. I always download ClamWin from its page so I do not expect problem on that end but still report here that issue with Microsoft Security Essentials as it happened only just now with this new ClamWin upgrade and if there is any issues with it I guess guys who build this fine piece of software should know about it. I will most likely exclude AV software specific files from search by other AV engines as it saves some time during search also. Large number of false positives I get from ClamSentinel are obfuscated files that show up as clean on virustotal so I will look up that guide thanks. I will report here if I have some news about this after tonight.

Report any false positive to Security Essentials and see if they fix it in a couple of days.

Here are my "trigger" AVs: Bitdefender, Avira AntiVir, Eset Nod32, Kaspersky, and Sophos. If at least 2 of them spot a file as malware, I will believe it. On Virus Total, look at the additional information to see when they first scanned a file. If it is older than a week, alt least a couple of AVs should detect it if it is malware. If it is older than 30 days, lots of AVs should detect it if it is malware.

Let us know how it goes.

Regards,