Chrome Has A Built In Malware Scanner Here S How To Use It

Lots of malware tries to bog down your browser, but Google Chrome isn’t defenseless—on Windows there’s a built-in scanner called Cleanup.

This software runs in the background periodically, but you can manually run a scan right now by heading to the URL chrome://settings/cleanup in your browser, or by going to Settings > Reset and clean up > Clean up computer. Give it a shot, especially if your browser seems sluggish.

RELATED: Browser Slow? How to Make Google Chrome Fast Again

This isn’t a general purpose malware scanner: it focuses on things that affect Chrome. From a blog post announcing the software back in October 2017:

It’s nice to know you’ve got a tool defending your browser, and it’s a good thing to try when Chrome is running slow slow. Thanks to Lawrence Abrams at Bleeping Computer for pointing this out to us.