Clam Sentinel

Clam Sentinel is a simple-to-use security program designed to automatically detect suspicious activity on the computer by monitoring files. It uses the ClamWin antivirus application, so this must be installed on the PC in order for the utility to work.

The installation procedure takes little time to finish, and you can ask Clam Sentinel to automatically run at Windows startup for all users. Once launched, you can select one or more disks to monitor, whether they are local, removable or on the network.

Clam Sentinel creates an icon in the taskbar notifications area and its real-time safeguard immediately becomes active. Opening its right-click menu gives you access to several commands and configuration settings.

For example, you can perform a memory scan to look for malware-infected files in the critical areas of the computer. In order to scan system processes, Clam Sentinel needs to be run with administrative rights. Results show the total number of known viruses, engine version, scanned directories and files, infected files, total size of read and scanned data, along with duration. Infected files are sent to the quarantine whose folder can be easily opened, while log details can be examined when it comes to the real-time, memory or drive scan, messages, or the quarantine.

The entire program or just memory scans can be set to automatically run at system startup. Scan activity is automatically written to log files but this option can be disabled. Instead of automatically moving infected files to the quarantine, the software utility can be asked to simply make a note of them in the report. Other scan settings pertain to the disks, files, paths and extensions to monitor, maximum number of simultaneous active scans, as well as maximum size for log files.

There were no kind of stability issues in our tests, since Clam Sentinel did not hang, crash or pop up error messages. It has a good response time and quickly carries out scan jobs while remaining light on system resources. Thanks to its standard and advanced settings alike, Clam Sentinel should meet the requirements of most users looking for an efficient av scanner with a real-time guard.