Antivirus software that doesn't run in the background

Is there such a thing antivirus that doesn't run in the background? Every antivirus I have tried runs in the background even if I stop protection, quit, or etc; there still are drivers/services of the antivirus that run.

When I want to scan for viruses I'll open it. Otherwise I don't want it running at all. How can I achieve this?

Solution 1:

If you don't want active protection, most av programs you can disable "active" or "real-time protection", or use clamwin.

Microsoft Security Essentials for example, you can turn off "real-time protection" in the settings.

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http://www.clamwin.com/

Please note that ClamWin Free Antivirus does not include an on-access real-time scanner. You need to manually scan a file in order to detect a virus or spyware

Solution 2:

As others have said, most antivirus software packages allow you do disable real-time scanning. That being said, most full-featured AV products, even when you disable real-time scanning, are still running in the background. They're just not scanning.

If you want something that resides in your right-click menu that will just run when and where you want it, a scanner such as MalwareBytes AntiMalware should work pretty well. You can set it not to run at all when the computer starts, and it can place a right-click option for scanning files, folders, or entire drives as you require.

Best of all, it's free and it's pretty well respected as an on-demand scanner.

Full-featured AV suites generally work better as "border protection", detecting and stopping threats before they actually get into your computer, and so need to be running and protecting in real-time to be truly effective. To go to an on-demand "police force" sort of setup, while the big AV products may work, they're just not designed for this method, and so you're better off selecting an on-demand program such as MBAM for use in this role.

Solution 3:

You'd want to go for one of the solutions used when people suspect they have a virus, like Microsoft MSRT and stinger if you want a portable solution.

If you don't want a persistant AV, malwarebytes is a good option.

And as always, prevention is better than cure - run as a limited user if possible, and practice skeptical computing