This Wednesday, we turn our attention to the problem of malware. This scourge brings down an increasing number of PCs everyday and there seems to be no end in sight. While you can change some of your browsing habits to prevent getting malware on your machine, it will inevitably creep in to your PC or that of someone you know. Since malware can come in many forms, it’s difficult to know just how it will attack. Last week, McAfee announced at least one million users are victims of scareware everyday. That’s a staggering number. While their infections may not be preventable in all cases, they can be cleaned up easily using the proper utilities. One great program to do so is Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware.

Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware

One of the best things about this program is that it is easy to get. You can download a version for free from the company’s website. In minutes, you can have this great program installed. It’s regularly updated, so you can be sure that it has the latest definitions in its databases. It’s built to be light, so it won’t bog down your resources too much if you run a scan regularly. You can run scans on all of your drives easily and quickly, helping your machine remain clean. Once again, it’s FREE. Free is definitely the best price for software. Unfortunately, the free version of the software is limited somewhat.

Should You Upgrade to a Paid Full Version?

I debated for a long time as to whether or not I should upgrade to the full paid version of the software. One of the major limitations of the free version is that you cannot schedule scans. Actively planning to run scans can be difficult to do, as I regularly forget to do so. I find that I usually only end up running the program when a problem arises. In most cases, this works fine, but if a particularly nasty bit of malware gets on my PC, I have been able to remove it by running the program in safe mode. The ignore and quarantine support runs fine in free mode so there is no real reason to upgrade there. In the end, it comes down to convenience, whether or not you want to be able to schedule scans.