I’m always looking for new and interesting utilities. The Internet is a wealth of these utilities and many of them are free. In this series of blogs I’ll go over some of the best and most interesting I have found – I welcome you to go try one of them and let me know what you think!

Today I look at a very useful, free utility on the web for virus scanning. You may be aware of some of the free online virus scanners such as Eset’s Online Scanner or Panda’s ActiveScan. These applications are all great for performing an active entire computer scan of your system if your main application is broken (or perhaps you need a second opinion). Where these utilities fail, though is the file-centric approach that Jotti‘s scanner takes over.

Jotti‘s scanner allows you to scan a single suspected file using a number of anti-virus scanning engines. The list of scanners is actually quite impressive – showing you the differences in how various virus scanners name and recognize files. You can really use this to your advantage when you have a file on your system that you’re not quite sure about – but want to use it without having to scan your entire system (or install an anti-virus package).

The value here is in the recognition that virus scanning is not an exact science. Using this tool increases your ability to catch malicious software exponentially by using engines from different vendors. I expect this scanner to include more scanning engines as time goes on.

This scanner is free to use and currently has a 15mb file limit. Use caution when sending an receiving files anyway – don’t send sensitive or personal files.