Add VirusScan to Explorer system tasks

[thom]

We would like students to scan all of their USB drives before they use them in a PC.

 

Normally you would open up My Computer, right-click on the drive and choose "Scan for Viruses". However, we don't allow students access to the right-click context menu.

 

I though it would be handy if the students could select the drive and then use a link in the system tasks (on the right hand side of explorer windows) to scan it.

 

Can this be done through some kind of registry tweak? Or is there a better way of managing this?

We use McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.0i as our anti-virus solution.

[Ric_]

Surely 'on-access' scanning negates the need to prescan the drives?

[thom]

That's what I thought, until we had a couple of viruses that weren't detected!

[Ric_]

@thom: Perhaps you need to increase the scanning level so that all files are scanned and you scan inside archives. I believe that most AV programs don't scan these by default.

 

If your AV doesn't have the definitions for a virus, scheduled or on-access scanning would fail anyway so scanning the disk is useless.

 

You would also need to consider how you are going to force users to scan the disks. Honestly, who's going to bother scanning the drive? Would you?

[thom]

Are definitions are always up to date as they are centrally managed and deployed at startup.

I will check to see if they are scanning inside archives though.

Honestly, who's going to bother scanning the drive?

OK, I take your point. I suppose I just thought it would be a cool feature to have. I would still like to know if it is possible.