The Cleaner 4.0 - part III

by Andrew Cooper

Additional features

As I mentioned earlier, the Cleaner comes with two extra components called TCActive! and TCMonitor.

TCActive! Is used to monitor all active processes and applications. As soon as it spots a Trojan TCActive! calls for the main module of the Cleaner to "kill" it. It is available as an icon in the system tray and clicking on it gives you the following window:



From this window you can terminate any active process you want as well as "quarantine" it. The quarantine option allows you to freeze the file as a backup after removing its registry entries and deleting it from the system. Later if you decide this file was not malicious you can restore it.

What also surprised me is that TCActive can display BHO (Browser Helper Objects) and allows you to add them to the Ignore list or to quarantine them.

The second tool, TCMonitor, watches all changes in the most sensitive registry paths that are typically used by Trojans, viruses and spyware. TCMonitor is also available via its icon in the system tray. The purpose of this tool is to prevent unauthorized registry changes made by Trojans and viruses. This is a very useful tool and I wonder why not many other developers have added this feature to their products.

Another interesting feature I can mention is the ability to schedule a scan via the Options/Schedule section. Some users definitely will like this, but I don't think I'd use it much myself.

Finally, you can browse and search the list of malicious pests included in the Cleaner's library, however there are not many details besides which class the Trojan belongs to. Adding such info as the ports utilized and registry paths would be more useful I think.

But what surprised me the number of trojans you can see in the database is lower than the number of trojans definitions reported in the program's main window. I explain this by the fact that each trojan can have several definitions according to how many variants this pest has offsprang.

On this page MooSoft compares how well the Cleaner measures up to other anti-trojan programs. I suggest that they should put the exact number of trojans and not definitions (variants) next to the Cleaner's rating. This would make this chart more correct and fair, as it seems other anti-trojans were assigned with number of trojans not variants.

Verdict



The Cleaner is a good anti-trojan scanner with a decent set of features. From my point of view it lacks usability, but perhaps it is just right for you, so I'd recommend giving it a try.

What can really be the issue is its price of 49.95 USD per single copy. I think it is too much for anti-trojan if you already using antivirus.

Developer's web site: http://www.moosoft.com

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