About 3 months ago, Emsisoft has released a major update on a-squared and renamed it as Anti-Malware. If you have not heard of it, Emsisoft Anti-Malware (previous a-squared) has been recently taking the top 3, if not the first spot in malware detection tests. However its great detection does come with a price which is Emsisoft Anti-Malware 5.0 slows down in most actions that is performed on your computer, for example, compressing and decompressing files, converting audio to mp3, boot time, writing of text files and etc. If you check the antivirus benchmark report, most of the time you will find that Emsisoft Anti-Malware 5.0 is at the bottom, taking the most time to complete the benchmark.
Please don’t take it wrongly that antivirus slows down your computer are bad. Some people may have a very powerful computer and slowing down merely a few seconds doesn’t matter to them as long as they know they are getting one of the best protection for their computer. Some other people like me that are very particular in squeezing every ounce of speed and having some knowledge on how not to get infected in the first place would prefer something lighter. Antivirus are meant to protect your computer from virus and that is their first priority but able to do that without putting much toil on the computer is a bonus.
Emsisoft had a few free 1 year license giveaway last year and they are either about to or already expired. If you liked Emsisoft Anti-Malware, then here’s your chance to win a 1 year Emsisoft Anti-Malware 5.0 full license worth $40 each.
The graphical user interface has been simplified and easy to manage as they are very straight forward. However when you go to the Guard tab, you can define application rules to protect certain process or executable file from being manipulated. Some malwares has the ability to inject itself to legitimate process and you won’t find anything suspicious just by looking at Task Manager. There are more options for Behavior Blocker, File Guard, Surf Protection and Host Rules.
Emsisoft Anti-Malware 5.0 has 2 scanners to clean infections which is its own anti-malware engine and Ikarus Anti-Virus engine. It also comes with a newly written file guard which has the ability to scan programs when they are executed, created/modified or read. By default the file guard scans all files when they are created or modified but that slows down many operations on your computer. In my opinion, scanning only programs when they are executed should be good enough so you can have both the best protection and performance at the same time.
Another huge improvement for Emsisoft Anti-Malware 5.0 is the full support for Windows 7 and also 100% compatibility with 64 bit Windows. Also if your full version license is expired, the software can still work by automatically reverting back to freeware license allowing you to clean malware but without the guard features.
Another feature that I like in Emsisoft Anti-Malware 5.0 is the ability to limit the allowed configuration actions for non-admin user accounts. The Guest or Standard User won’t be able to mess around with the configurations and cause your computer to get infected if your computer is used by your family members or friends. There are also hundreds of other small improvements made on Emsisoft Anti-Malware 5.0.
If you are interested in the giveaway, please first make sure that you’ve already a subscriber of our newsletter and then leave a comment. The lucky winners will be announced 24 hours later and I will send the coupon code to convert it into full license. Thanks to Christian Mairoll for sponsoring a hundred license to Raymond.CC readers. We are splitting the giveaway into 2 times. I have no specific dates for the second giveaway but it would be probably on September.