Kaspersky System Checker is a portable free tool which scans your PC for a range of problems: malware, missing updates, poorly configured Windows or application settings, a shortage of hard drive space, and more.

The program doesn't provide any way to directly fix these issues, but it may point you in the right direction, and that's useful enough.

There's no installation required. Download, run, click a button and your system is scanned. A logging pane keeps you up-to-date with what's happening.

The scanning process took around three minutes on our test PC. When it was over, significant issues were listed in a "Detected items" pane, with passed tests listed underneath ("No malware detected", "No device problems detected" etc).

We found the scan results weren't always clear, a major problem when you're supposed to use them to find a solution yourself. Here's the entire text of one of our "detected items".

Displaying drives in Windows Explorer is limited
Disk loss in Windows Explorer seriously hampers the ability of the user to work with their applications and data.
This problem is usually caused by active malware.
Failure to correct the problem causes the loss of essential apps or user files.

"Displaying drives in Windows Explorer is limited"? What does that mean? Are they talking about whether drives might be hidden? If so, how does this relate to "Disk loss"? And what are we supposed to do about this, anyway?

Fortunately, other items were much more helpful. We were told that our HOSTS file was modified, and given a link to open it immediately, and the program warned up that we were missing a QuickTime update. We would have to find and install it ourselves, but now we knew about the issue, that wouldn't take long.

The program also includes a browser extension and application viewer. You can choose to see "Large Programs", for instance, and launch their regular uninstaller with a click. And selecting "Browser Extensions" displayed our installed Chrome and Firefox extensions, along with their descriptions, although we couldn't do anything with this information other than look at it.