Download McAfee Stinger – Download & Review Free

McAfee Stinger is a portable free application designed to remove malware-infected files from your computer. It scans hard drives on demand and detects viruses, rootkits, Trojans, worms and other electronic threats.

Portability advantages

Since there’s no installation package involved, you can drag and drop the executable file anywhere on your hard drive and launch the tool instantly. You can also save McAfee Stinger to a pen drive and scan any suspicious computers without installing anything else.

Keep in mind that the storage device should not be read-only, as the application automatically creates some files when running, such as logs containing statistics for each scan. An important aspect to consider is that, unlike most installers, McAfee Stinger does not modify Windows registry settings.

Clean and intuitive interface

The GUI is user-friendly and consists of a neatly laid out regular window. By default, the application only views system areas known to harbor viruses, such as program files and Windows directories. However, you can customize the scan and reduce its duration by manually selecting a drive or directory.

Identify and quarantine malware

During the scan, you can view the currently verified files, scan time and total number of files scanned, as well as threats found and removed. Any suspicions are sent to Quarantine, where you can decide whether to keep or delete the files in question. Log details can be inspected in separate files. It is possible to modify the default location of the quarantine and include all scanned files in the log.

Evaluation and Conclusion

The tool uses medium RAM and low CPU during the scanning process, which may take a while depending on the size of the target. However, we encountered some issues during testing. McAfee Stinger does not take into account the custom locations we assigned for scanning and continues to run in default mode.

Still, users are welcome to try McAfee Stinger for themselves and decide if it’s a suitable on-demand virus scanner for them. Keep in mind that it doesn’t offer real-time protection against malware, so you’ll still need to install a comprehensive antivirus app to keep your PC safe at all times.