Microsoft has released a free malware scanning tool called Microsoft Safety Scanner, which is designed to quickly scan your system for viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. It is portable in nature and does not require any installation. Users can use Microsoft Safety Scanner with their existing antivirus or internet security program, as it does not provide real time protection, and hence does not conflict.

The program is about 70 MB in size and includes all the latest virus definitions. A major inconvenience with Microsoft Safety scanner is that the virus definitions cannot be updated and it forces users to download a new version of the program after every 10 days, with the latest virus definitions.

Microsoft Safety scanner is currently compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit version of Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

Microsoft Safety Scanner provides three types of scanning: quick scan, full scan and custom scan. A quick scan will scan the core system files required to run windows. A full scan will scan the entire system including all hard drives, registry and memory. And a custom scan will scan the user selected files or folders.