I’m loving Win 8.1 and even more with the update. Having realised that Win 8/8.1 is the most secure Operating System (OS) from Microsoft, I decided a while ago to ditch my 3rd party Antivirus and just use Windows Defender but to hedge my bets, I also continued with using Malwarebytes Pro (MBAM). I haven’t had any problems at all and Windows Defender seems to play nicely with MBAM 🙂 I have this set up on my main desktop PC and a laptop running Win 8.1 and also a laptop running Win 7 and Microsoft Security Essentials. I’m old enough and ugly enough to know that no Antivirus product is always going to be 100% because it can only protect what it knows about but I’m thinking that the “Bad Website” blocker in MBAM is probably one of the key features. MBAM does always seem to find stuff that other Antivirus misses, which is why it’s been part of my virus bashing “toolkit” for years!
So do you need a 3rd party antivirus with Win 8.1? To be honest, I’m not sure that you do, Windows Defender seems to do a very good job, along with the now brilliant firewall, but I think the addition of MBAM, even the free one (provided you do a manual weekly scan) is all you need. To add fuel to my fire, I’ve had to spend a few hours removing malware from a PC that had my recommended (paid for) 3rd party antivirus installed and was updated daily. My recommended 3rd party anti virus has now, imo, become bloatware and doesn’t do the job any more. Trying to remove it completely was very difficult, even the removal tool left 100’s of crumbs in the registry and it messed about with standard permissions actively disabling the built-in security of Windows 8.1, I’m guessing it’s so that their product could be used in place of and not in concert with the built-in security!