Looking for a good U3 AV software

For those here who have not heard of U3, basically put it U3 is a new way of using a USB flash drive as a portable HDD and you actually run software of it. So far there are only a small amount of apps available for it. Such as Portable Firefox, Portable thunderbird, Abi Word, File Zilla, Gaim, Open Office Org and a few others.

How it works is that assume you take the USB flash and plug into a USB port of another PC, the USB flash than will become the HDD of that PC, so i.e all the software/progs you run will run off the USB flash and will not install onto the HDD of the PC. Eg I can go overseas or to my friends house plug in my USB flash drive in his/hers PC and use Mozilla Thunderbird (email client) to pick up my email on the go, providing that you/I have the correct server account settings in Thunderbird.

I know as a fact quite a few companies now are relesaing AV software for these U3 flash drives one of them being Avast and McAfee, but would like to know if anybody knows any more or even good free ones out there.

You can also make your own U3 USB flash drive as follows:

1. Buy a USB flash drive, preferably 512MB and above.
2. Download the files from the following link and install them

http://johnhaller.com/jh/

Once done, insert the USB flash in your USB port and run the progs you've downloaded from the drive.

Further links:

http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_u3_edition_download.html

http://antivirus.about.com/od/antivirussoftwarereviews/a/usbantivirus.htm

http://www.trendmicro.com/en/about/news/pr/archive/2005/pr060705.htm

http://www.mcafee.com/us/about/press/corporate/2005/20050107_100625.htm

 

I have seen, albiet a while ago, at the VirusChaser webpage they have a version that runs off a USB drive in realtime also, so there must be a way with Dr. Web to do this since VirusChaser is based on the Dr.

HTH

I know it is not free, but it was the only one that came to mind.

 

The French site Zebulon has done a "portable" version of Clamwin : you can execute it from an USB key, without to install it on the computer HD .

...But sorry, both the site and the program are in French language

http://www.zebulon.fr/articles/antivirus-clamwin-portable-1.php


Cheers,
nicM

 

The free versions of Spybot, AdAware and Ewido will also all happily run off a USB drive if you just copy across their respective installation folders from c:\Program Files

 

Coming back onto the subject of U3, can any USB thumb drive be transformed into a U3 drive ? or does someone have to buy a special U3 drive ?