McAfee Stinger

First up, you need to know that McAfee Stinger is not a good replacement for an antivirus solution. Sure, the application can detect and remove viruses, but it does not provide real-time protection against such threats. McAfee Stinger is a portable, free, virus scanner. It can be used to scan a machine and remove specific viruses.

As mentioned above, McAfee Stinger is a portable application. Of course, this means you won’t have to install the application on your PC. To get started with McAfee Stinger you must download an executable (little over 10MB in size), run it, wait while Stinger loads, and then accept the McAfee End User License Agreement. Do so and you will be presented with McAfee Stinger’s user friendly interface.

In the upper left hand corner of the application’s interface there are three buttons:
Scan – launch a system scan or a custom scan.
Quarantine – a backup of infected files cleaned with the application.
Log – review log files and access more details about scans performed with the application.

In the upper right hand corner of the interface there’s an Advanced dropdown menu that lists the following three buttons:
Blacklist – Stinger will detect these user specified MD5 hashes.
Settings – select what to scan, play with some scan options, choose what happens when a threat is found.
Threat List – a list of all the threats Stinger looks for when it scans your system.

Using McAfee Stinger is a very simple process: launch the application, initiate a scan, let Stinger find and remove threats from your machine.

McAfee Stinger is offered for the great price of free. This is a free security tool for Windows-powered machines.

There’s much to like about McAfee Stinger: it is portable, it is free, it can scan your machine and uncover threats.
But mind you, it is not a replacement for an antivirus solution.