I’ve had Malwarebytes for years on my personal windows pc and it’s up for renewal. Is Defender sufficient or something else cheaper but better? My default is to cancel.
Defender is free and if you get something it can’t mitigate then you’re better off wiping anyways.
interestingly, this is likely the most truthful and practical statement I have read today.
Nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.
Cancel. The paid plans are mostly for business customers or the additional features. Even if you like their product, the core antivirus is the same for free tiers as it is for paid.
As for Windows Defender, it is perfectly fine for the majority of people. It is no longer the hot pile of garbage it once was. If it was me, I’d just switch to WD.
denender will suffice but the best protection is common sense. If for whatever reason you find yourself needing to interact with sus files there are ways to do so safely in a contained environment
Perfect
You’ll be fine with Defender. If you want some extra on-demand scanning of specific files, you can just use the free version of malwarebytes (if that still exists).
Malwarebytes double-charged my elderly grandmother and then refused to provide the service that she overpaid for because of a non-functional email verification system. Don’t use Malwarebytes. Unless you’re downloading tons of executables from some questionable source a virus won’t randomally appear on your PC and even if it does, Microsoft
spywareDefender will do the exact same thing any other anti-virus would.Use ClamAV
And also windows defender. Both are free (as in beer) and effective enough if you aren’t just running any random crap you get from the internet.
Agreed
clamav is an option but, if you get to the point of thinking about clam, I would pull the storage device and scan with clam on a known clean machine (cuz you never know what a nasty may have done to the victim PCs EFI / bootchainI)
Defender is fine.
My SO is still on Windows, so I just have Malwarebytes installed to run a periodic (free) scan, and run Defender for active protection. We’ve been doing that pretty much ever since Defender became a thing and haven’t had any issues.
As others said, if there’s an issue Defender didn’t detect, investigate, and if it’s actual malware, reinstall. That’ll cover you 99% of the time, and the other 1% (rootkits) of the time isn’t worth protecting against for the average person.
