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

The program is just a checker, and doesn’t provide any way to directly fix the issues it finds, but sometimes just being pointed in the right direction is 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).

There’s no complexity to the program – it’s just download, run, and click

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? Our guess would be that Explorer has been set to hide some drives, but we’ve no idea how this is supposed to relate to “disk loss”. There’s no indication of what we’re supposed to do about this, either, which makes this detection almost entirely useless. We’d expect much better from a company like Kaspersky.

Fortunately, other items were more helpful. We were told that our HOSTS file was modified, and given a link to open it. We clicked this, chose to open the file with Notepad and quickly verified that the file was okay.

We were also warned that our system was missing a QuickTime update. We would have to install this ourselves, but just knowing about the problem was helpful.

If the Report doesn’t tell you what you need, a System Info tab provides a little more: basic system information, lists of installed applications and browser extensions. Beware, as with most of the program, this is more about displaying information than allowing you to do anything with it.

Should you try Kaspersky System Checker? Overall, yes– it’s easy to use and might help diagnose odd system problems. Just be aware that you’ll probably have to find any solutions yourself.

Kaspersky System Checker is available for Windows 7 and later.