Do you often download files and wonder are they safe? Would you like another opinion about these files apart from your resident antivirus? How about having any of your existing files, or potential download files checked by over 50 antivirus companies at the click of a button?
You may have used VirusTotal or Jotti to check suspicious files in the past, but now you can get a small add on application from VirusTotal to make checking files faster and easier. You can check both on and offline files and it works on all modern Windows systems, is free, tiny in size, and reliable. The same file size limit of 32MB applies as when you do a direct website file scan.
Go HERE to get your copy, download it to somewhere you can find, navigate to it and double left click the file to open it and begin the install. You can safely ignore any security warning or your User Access Control warning.
Accept the License agreement, click "I agree"
Accept the install options, click "Next"
There should be no reason to change the default install location, click "Install"
After a few seconds a Virustotal icon should appear on the desktop.
To use this application let's say we wish to gain another opinion on a file we have on our computer.
Navigate to the file we wish to check, right click the file, then left click "Send to VirusTotal" from the menu.
A small dialogue box will briefly appear, the VirusTotal icon will appear in the taskbar, and if it's not already open your default browser will open at the VirusTotal web site. In this example it shows the file has already been scanned, and is passed as clean by all the scan engines.
Lets say we now wish to run a fresh VirusTotal scan to make sure the file is safe. Left click the taskbar icon and a small dialogue box will open. Click "Reupload files" and a new scan will be initiated. The file will be uploaded to VirusTotal and depending on the file size and your internet speed may take some time. The file will then be scanned as if it was the first time.
A very handy feature of VirusTotal allows you to scan a file you might be considering to download, VirusTotal can actually scan it before you start the download. As an example we may like a particular application but are unsure of downloading it. Here's how you do it.
Go to the web page that has the download link, then right click the download link and select "Copy Link Location" from the menu.
Double left click the virustotal desktop icon.
In the "URL" box left click to highlight it, and then select "Paste"
Then click "Get and Upload"
Again the VirusTotal website scan page will open and if the file has been scanned previously display the results. If by chance the file has not been scanned then VirusTotal will carry out a new scan.
If a scan had been carried out previously of the online file, you can of course force a rescan by clicking the taskbar icon and again selecting "reupload files" as we did earlier with our off line files.
VirusTotal has several features, and this short guide has demonstrated a couple of very handy ones we hope you will also find useful?
If you have any questions regarding VirusTotal or other computer related issues please feel free to ask in our forums.
You may have used VirusTotal or Jotti to check suspicious files in the past, but now you can get a small add on application from VirusTotal to make checking files faster and easier. You can check both on and offline files and it works on all modern Windows systems, is free, tiny in size, and reliable. The same file size limit of 32MB applies as when you do a direct website file scan.
Go HERE to get your copy, download it to somewhere you can find, navigate to it and double left click the file to open it and begin the install. You can safely ignore any security warning or your User Access Control warning.
Accept the License agreement, click "I agree"
Accept the install options, click "Next"
There should be no reason to change the default install location, click "Install"
After a few seconds a Virustotal icon should appear on the desktop.
To use this application let's say we wish to gain another opinion on a file we have on our computer.
Navigate to the file we wish to check, right click the file, then left click "Send to VirusTotal" from the menu.
A small dialogue box will briefly appear, the VirusTotal icon will appear in the taskbar, and if it's not already open your default browser will open at the VirusTotal web site. In this example it shows the file has already been scanned, and is passed as clean by all the scan engines.
Lets say we now wish to run a fresh VirusTotal scan to make sure the file is safe. Left click the taskbar icon and a small dialogue box will open. Click "Reupload files" and a new scan will be initiated. The file will be uploaded to VirusTotal and depending on the file size and your internet speed may take some time. The file will then be scanned as if it was the first time.
A very handy feature of VirusTotal allows you to scan a file you might be considering to download, VirusTotal can actually scan it before you start the download. As an example we may like a particular application but are unsure of downloading it. Here's how you do it.
Go to the web page that has the download link, then right click the download link and select "Copy Link Location" from the menu.
Double left click the virustotal desktop icon.
In the "URL" box left click to highlight it, and then select "Paste"
Then click "Get and Upload"
Again the VirusTotal website scan page will open and if the file has been scanned previously display the results. If by chance the file has not been scanned then VirusTotal will carry out a new scan.
If a scan had been carried out previously of the online file, you can of course force a rescan by clicking the taskbar icon and again selecting "reupload files" as we did earlier with our off line files.
VirusTotal has several features, and this short guide has demonstrated a couple of very handy ones we hope you will also find useful?
If you have any questions regarding VirusTotal or other computer related issues please feel free to ask in our forums.
