I don’t know what the proportion of online users it is that don’t actually have an antivirus software installed on their system (hopefully not that many). However if that’s you or if you’ve had yours installed for some time and wanted to test out your antivirus tool and see whether it’s actually been keeping your system from nasty bugs then this video is worth watching.

The video below will introduce to you four popular services online in which will scan your system for free for viruses, spyware, malware, etc…

Before you watch the video, first of all, here are the links you might find helpful as you follow along:

• kaspersky.com/virusscanner
• bitdefender.com
• pandasecurity.com
• housecall.trendmicro.com

Using these online services is great, there is probably not much disadvantage of using them although only Trend Micro supports Firefox while the others will require you to dig out your old IE again. All four of the sites mentioned above will not force you to make any payments to buy their products in order to remove a virus which they have detected.

The only downside  is that it can be a problem if you have a slow internet connection as these services will indefinitely require you to download some sort of virus definition before the scan starts for the first time.

Having just tried Trend Micro’s Housecall myself as I didn’t want to bother launching my IE, I found that it was quite a lengthy process just to scan one of my old laptop’s 40GB hard drive, so this is probably something you want to take into consideration before you try this on a system that’s already multi-tasking! - make sure you have the spare time! Also, using these services don’t provide your system with on-access protection and are just one offs, so at the end of the day if you catch a high grade virus that’s capable of doing considerable damage once executed, it may be too late by the time you manage to access the online scanner, therefore it’s always a good idea to have proper antivirus protection standing-by 24/7!