Trend Micro HouseCall on Vista/ Free online scan for antivirus
I have installed AVG Free as anti-virus software on my laptop. I think they are quite good. Although it is quite safe, sometime I will use other online virus checker to scan my computer to ensure my computer is secure.
I used to use Trend Micro HouseCall to do a online scan on my computer, sometime it did find some Trojan and worms, but AVG did not notice it. But as soon as I upgrade my laptop to Windows Vista, HouseCall did not work again. On the previous version of HouseCall it did say it does not support Windows Vista. When I check it again today, it said it did now.
My computer has not done any full virus scan for quite awhile, I think I should have a try now. I am not sure if it is something not quite right on my computer. I cannot get it work on my IE, it said “HouseCall is not available for your platform”…"You can not use Trend Micro HouseCall on your machine because your processor type or your operating system are not supported." etc. (but on the front page, they did say they support vista and IE6 or above). I hope it is not something to do with my CPU which is “Centrino Duo ”.
When i try again on Firefox, it seems to work. The different is I need to download an exe file instead of running it directly on browser(Firefox).
After I downloaded the “housecall66.exe” I just double click on it to execute it.
When you started it, it will ask you to accept the terms and condition agreement.
Once you done that you need to choose a HouseCall Kernel which his either a Brower base or Java base. Then you would need to download the plug-in, it may take awhile. (I chose Browser Base)
Then you will see a “Select Scan Options” screen.
Recommended scan - only scan for malware, grayware, vulnerability and selected location. It will perform quicker
Complete scan - probably will scan for everything on you PC
Customized Scan - you can select what to scan. It has one more option than Recommended Scan which is scan open network port I think it would be quite useful to see if your computer has open a network port which could be attack by hacker. If you have selected “Open Network ports” it will pop up a message to inform you that the program will perform a port scan. (It is not a hacker attack (not this time))
It takes about 4 hours to scan my computer, which has 160GB HDD, filled in around 110GB data
My scan result
Here it is the URL for Trend Micro HouseCall online scan. http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
Hope your find it useful.
