My Review Of IObit Malware Fighter
The latest in my series of reviews of free 2012 antivirus programs is for IObit Malware Fighter (version 1.3).
KEY BENEFITS:
- Simple interface
- Quite good at detecting malware
- Found tracking cookies missed by other programs
System requirements
The program has the suggested minimum system requirements:
- Windows XP (32-bit and 64-bit) (SP2) / Vista (32-bit and 64-bit) / 7 (32-bit and 64-bit) / 8* / 2000
- 300 Mhz processor or faster
- 256 MB of RAM
- 30 MB of hard drive space
*Windows 8 compatibility is mentioned now, despite the new operating system not yet being released!
Installation and first impression
Whilst installation of this program is quick, you’ll be given a bit of a runaround after visiting IObit’s page as you’ll have to go through a few other web pages to finally get it via Major Geeks.
Once you’ve been through those admittedly simple hoops you’ll be up and running in no time.
As you can see above, the interface is very simple and uncluttered, something that I know many antivirus users appreciate.
Once you have the program up and running you will want to update the virus definitions database before proceeding. After doing so I’d be interested in hearing if you have the same issue as me – the above screenshot was taken straight after an update and clearly shows that Definitions are out of date. This is an erroneous message (I presume) as trying to update again gave me a message to say that the database was in fact fully up to date!
Features
As you can see in the various images, the program is divided into 4 main sections:
- Overview
- Scan
- Protect
- Cloud
The overview will give you some basic information such as whether you are protected or not, whether your database is up to date and a summary of any threats that have been found.
Scan leads, obviously, to the scanning options which are:
- Smart scan
- Full scan
- Custom scan
When I tried the program out the first scan seemed to default to a smart scan – you may want to run a full scan asap though.
The protect area is shown in the screenshot above. As you can see, this area allows you to switch various features on or off. These features are:
- Startup guard
- Browser guard
- Network guard
- File guard
- Cookie guard
- Process guard
- USB disk guard
- Malicious action guard
The cloud section allows you to upload potentially suspicious files to the cloud where their behaviour can then be monitored.
Resource usage
When running a full scan with IObit Malware Fighter I found memory usage wasn’t too high at all. CPU usage was a little high but not excessive – the 48% seen in the image below wasn’t far off the peak and 40% was probably about average for the duration of the scan.
Most importantly, running a full scan didn’t cripple my laptop, unlike some antivirus programs I’ve tried recently.
Conclusion
When testing the program against a selection of malware I found it’s detection rates to be pretty good. Perhaps not as high as a paid for antivirus solution but not far off nonetheless. Also, the program did find a few tracking cookies that no other free antivirus program has found on my system thus far so thats a plus point.
I am, however, a little concerned about the issue I mentioned near the beginning, namely the fact that I cannot be sure I have the most up to date set of virus definitions. Unless that situation gets resolved it would be sufficient to put me off using this program myself.
Check out my other reviews of 2012 free antivirus programs.
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Article by Lee Munson
Lee's non-technical background allows him to write about internet security in a clear way that is understandable to both IT professionals and people just like you who need simple answers to your security questions.
Lee has written 2874 awesome articles for us at Security FAQs
