Safe Returner is a comprehensive free antivirus that relies on a heuristic engine to scan for viruses, worms, and Trojans. Rather than scanning a whole computer for malware, Safe Returner looks at the most critical startup locations (all known registry load points etc.) for viruses. In fact, according to the publishers, Safe Returner utilizes the “Autoruns for Windows” technology pioneered by Sysinternals. The tool and technology is the most comprehensive startup analyzer known. However, Safe Returner automates the whole identification process (originally not very easy) by simply pressing scan. The program also has regular definition updates and scans very fast.
The installation of Safe Returner went well. While the program technically only supports 32 bit Windows, I was able to install it on a 64 bit machine. After the installation was completed, a nice pop-up stated that Safe Returner may not completely function on 64 bit Windows. However, I didn’t encounter any specific problems.
The scanning process of Safe Returner was quick. In fact, the whole system scan took under 2 minutes. What’s interesting is that before starting a scan. A question is asked whether one already knows if their system is already infected by malware. If one answers yes, then the program attempts to stop all non necessary active processes. This is an interesting feature that I have not seen before in other free antivirus.
The scan didn’t detect any viruses or Trojans in the normal mode. However, one will notice that there is an expert button on the scan page. There, a user can see all suspicious entries. I highly recommend clicking this button and seeing what may have been missed. On the test system, all of the detected entries were ranked by severity. While all of the files were false positives, Safe Returner appears to correctly detect rouge services or drivers because it detected “NetLimiter” which installs a network driver to operate.
Safe Returner is very light on the system resources. The program only uses about 2.5 megabytes of RAM at all times and CPU usages in negligible. Unfortunately, besides scanning and a USB autorun.inf protection, Safe Returner doesn’t really offer any additional features. However, I see an advantage for novice users who can’t use startup analyze tools.
