


If risky site visits are a frequent thing or you don’t bother with adblockers, those may also be reason to use third party AV. So for the more usual use case of one machine being used for everything, third party AV might make more sense. pirate streaming sites) and keep my browsers running uBlock Origin to help keep malvertising at bay. I also don’t poke around dodgy sites (e.g. Bitdefender, Avast, Avira, and Microsoft Defender Antivirus appear in the latest reports from all four labs, but Bitdefender is the clear winner, with a perfect 10 points. Image the inconvenience of being infected. Premium prevents malware infection from affecting your device in the first place while the Free version cleans up after a malware infection. Malwarebytes for Windows is available as a free version and as a premium version. However, it is safer to use Malwarebytes Premium, as it includes all the safety features. Malwarebytes Free vs Premium Features Table. It is a good tool for scanning your device from viruses and removing them.

Work, sensitive things like finances, etc are all taken care of on a Mac which isn’t impervious of course but much less likely to be targeted by way of representing only 9.5% of global marketshare (v.s. Is free Malwarebytes good enough Is Malwarebytes free version any good Yes. my gaming tower is almost entirely dedicated to gaming, and the most my Windows laptop ever does is web browsing and Anki flash cards. That said, my Windows machines are limited in scope in their usage – e.g. I’ve been using Windows Defender for several years at this point, because keeping up with which third party AVs have or haven’t turned to dog poo is something I just don’t want to bother with.
