Malwarebytes Anti-Malware has been a popular 'second opinion' scanner since 2008. Its free version is good, but the commercial goes further, offering real-time protection, scheduled scanning, and the ability to block malicious websites. It’s an appealing feature list, especially as the program gives you all this without conflicting with existing security tools. But how does it work in real life? We downloaded Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Premium 2 to take a look. Interface Anti-Malware installed without incident on our test Windows 8.1 system, creating a 'C: Program Files (x86) Malwarebytes Anti-Malware' with 46MB of its core code, and adding three background processes to our PC: the core MBAM.EXE, a scheduler and a Windows service, typically consuming around 112MB RAM in total. The program is launched from a system tray icon, and initially displays its Dashboard.

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This summarizes all the key system details, including your real-time protection level, database version and last scan time. You can launch scans directly from the Dashboard with a single click, but if you need more control then clicking the Scan button displays three options: 'Hyper Scan' runs a quick check of running processes, 'Threat Scan' (the new name for Quick Scan) also examines your Registry and the most vulnerable areas of the file system, while 'Custom Scan' allows you to precisely define exactly what the program should check (which can be everything, if you want to recreate the old Full Scan). Elsewhere, a Settings icon gives access to the program’s configuration options, 'History' leads you to Anti-Malware’s logs and any quarantined files, and 'My Account' displays your license details. None of this is particularly stylish or attractive. There are no Windows 8-like tiles, no eye-catching animations, none of the visual frills you’ll get with some of the competition. We’re not sure why the main dashboard had an advert or 'Malwarebytes Secure Backup', either.

That’s fine in the free version, but pay for the Premium build and we’d expect the ads to disappear. Overall, however, the interface works well. It’s clean, simple, easy to use and find what you need.

And, conveniently, it remembers and restores its state. So if you last closed the program while viewing the Scan pane, for example, it’ll reopen in the same place, perhaps saving you a click or two. Scanning Click 'Scan' on the Dashboard and Anti-Malware launches its Threat Scan, a reasonably thorough check which took an average 12 minutes to run on our test PC (that’s 320GB used hard drive space and 335,000 objects to examine). It’s worth noting that, while Anti-Malware can detect rootkits, this isn’t enabled by default. If you want to look for rootkits within a normal scan then you’ll have to turn it on manually (Settings > Detection and Protection, check 'Scan for rootkits'), and we found this increased scan times to around 20 minutes.

Alternatively, if performance matters most, telling the program not to check the contents of archives cut its scan times to around 5 minutes for us. And the Hyper Scan was fastest of all, checking everything running on our PC in around 2 minutes.

Another option is to schedule scans. If you feel you don’t want to check archives and look for rootkits every time, then you can turn these off for on-demand scans, improving their speeds. Schedule a more thorough daily/ weekly (or whatever) scan to search for everything and you’ll still be covered. However you’re running a scan, we found Anti-Malware to be reasonably light on resources: we knew it was working, but could continue to use most applications without problems, although there was some small effect on games and HD video playback. Detection Anti-Malware’s core on-demand scanning proved around average, with the program finding and fully removing 85 percent of our malware samples. One exception came with our test droppers, malware which didn’t do much itself, but would try to download and install the real payload. Anti-Malware missed two examples, in common with many other antivirus engines (they scored 13/52 and 18/52 at VirusTotal).

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Just to make the situation worse, the real-time protection missed one of the downloaded executables, too, which could have resulted in compromising our system. Nothing’s infallible, of course -- that’s why you might want to run Anti-Malware in the first place -- but it was a useful reminder that the program should be run alongside a full antivirus tool, not as its replacement. Anti-Malware also offers malicious website detection. This is implemented at the network level, so there are no browser add-ons required, and no extras like warning icons in your search engine results.