Scan for viruses online for free

Here's a nifty online utility you need to bookmark

Panda Nanoscan at http://www.nanoscan.com/ is an online virus scanner. It scans your local pc for around 962 749 viruses, trojans and spyware. Being online and professing to be mega-quick it obviously does not scan your entire hard drive, so it targets key files, directories and processes only.
I ran it on my family pc, which can be a real dog with this type of thing and it completed a full scan (quick setup excluded) in 80 seconds. I am happy to report nothing found.

You still need to keep your offline realtime virus checker(refer here post on free Anti-Virus packages). Although this utility is not going to check files as they are copied onto your hard drive, downloaded or as they arrive via an email, it's a great way of running a double check when you suspect malware to be the cause of a problem you are experiencing or if you are are unsure of the credentials of a pc you need to work on.

It does not disinfect should it find any malware, however it does offer another more comprehensive TotalScan should you wish to do so.

Correction : Thanks to Carlos at Panda Software for clearing up my statement below, and teaching me a bit of Spanish at the same time.
Original final paragraph :
[Finally, as a negative, it really irks me when the designers and owners of software and websites allow themselves to get lazy. This is a great utility which provides a fantastic service. So why the incorrect spelling in the analysis url http://www.nanoscan.com/analisis.aspx?]

Carlo's reponse :
"Thanks for publish the NanoScan´s information in your blog, but only one puntualization: the URL doesn´t include incorrect spelling, it´s write in spanish ;-)"

It always leaves a warm fuzzy feeling when a company takes the time to correspond with you before, during or after a posting that refers to one of the products.

Kudos to Panda!