Dr. Web Cureit! is a standalone free antivirus that is completely contained in a 46 megabyte download. Upon launching the scanner, the whole systems screen fades out slightly and states that the Dr. Web Cureit! has entered Enhanced Protection Mode or EPM. EPM essentially prevents malware from stopping or interfering with the antivirus scanning process. Therefore, the whole system has entered in a safe mode like state and can dedicate full resources to scanning for viruses. This great for malware that are designed to stop or interfere with antivirus
The user is then given two options to either update the software or start the scan. The update button, is kind of lacking in functionality in that all it does is redirect the user to the Dr. Web CureIT! website to download the latest version. The next option is to actually start the scan which is where the fun begins.
Once the start button is pushed an antivirus scanner immediately loads the virus scanner. Even though there appears to be other options to customize the scan, they are blanked out. A user can only change the language, pause the scan, or view statistics about what is detected. However, DR Web CureIt scans an impressive amount of system areas for viruses. They include
- Running Processes and Ram
- Boot Sectors
- Startup objects
- Boot disk root directory
- Windows directory
- Users folders and more.
The virus scan completely very quickly. The scanner finished in about 20 minutes and scanned about 21,278 files for viruses and utilized a robust 1,589,104 virus definitions during scanning.
On the Dr Web CureIt! statistic page, there is a lot of interesting information. This includes types of viruses, adware, that were detected. I really like the scan time and the speed at which the virus scan was being completed. On the test system, the scan was moving at a efficient speed of about 7 megabytes per second. Dr Web CureIt! used about 86 megabytes during the virus scan and about 10 percent of CPU power. Normal computing operations didn’t seem affected.
