In the ever expanding battle against malware, secondary security solutions are becoming a more common weapon against the unwashed mass of viruses and trojans out there. It certainly never hurts to have a freebie program in reserve.

We've reviewed some of these efforts recently, such as the capable Threatfire, which provides a useful and free backup to your main security suite. HouseCall attempts to fulfil a similar role, effectively supplying a virus doctor who can come round and take your PC's temperature on-demand via the Trend Micro website.

HouseCall consists of a small executable file downloaded from the site, which when run connects to the net and updates itself, taking a minute or two, before producing the program window. It's good to see that you're not forced to register with Trend, click through adverts, or indeed do anything else to get the program going. It isn't just free in monetary terms, but free of any possible annoyance as well.

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Once the HouseCall window is up, there's only one choice presented to the user, and that's to run a scan, though there are some option settings for the type of scan; a quick scan, a full system check, or a custom scan which targets specified folders. After that decision has been made, one click later you're away with the virus-finding faeries and their light blue progress bar of cleansing.

The scanner searches for malware such as viruses, trojans, spyware and worms. It's powered by Trend's smart protection network, meaning that the protection offered is “in-the-cloud” and up to the minute, constantly updated with the latest threat information (and feedback from other HouseCall users) that the Trend labs is processing. That's the theory, anyway.

And the program performed reasonably well, picking up the same spyware that our main security suite discovered on a sweep beforehand. It turned up something else as well - a trojan - although this turned out to be a false alert, as it was an executable file for a game that we're pretty certain isn't malware related. The scanner's behavioural routines were getting a little paranoid, perhaps, because we couldn't find anything dodgy related to this executable anywhere on security forums around the net.

HouseCall claims a light system footprint, as you'd expect from a simple executable running, although we did see our memory usage increase by around 15 percent when we used it. That's a bit more than we expected, but even so it didn't have much of an impact on our PC's overall performance.

Scan times are on the slow side: although the quick scan isn't too bad at 15 minutes or so, a full scan takes a number of hours (over four hours on our medium sized hard drive, in fact). As long as you have a bit of patience and some time in which to run the program, again it's nothing to be unduly concerned about.

HouseCall 7.1 is a free and useful backup malware scanner which could pair up nicely with, and add an extra layer of security to, a freeware primary security solution such as AVG. You can download it quickly and easily onto any machine, and it's fairly light on system resources.