Webroot SecureAnywhere Essentials 2012 review

Webroot's SecureAnywhere Essentials 2012 (£39.395 for one year, three PCs at the time of writing) offering shows lots of promise. SecureAnywhere represents a complete overhaul of Webroot's product line, with a brand-new interface and new internals to go along with it. The package is fast, and it's good at catching malware before the invader reaches your PC, but a higher-than-average false-positive rate and disappointing system-cleanup results keep it from ranking any higher.

Webroot's new offering is effective at stopping brand-new malware, as it blocked 96.2% of attacks in our real-world malware detection tests. It also detected 99.49% of known malware samples - that's a better-than-average outcome, though a little short of the best security performers, some of which can detect over 99.99% of samples.

In a couple of areas, however, the Webroot suite struggled: For instance, it mistook 11 known safe files (out of a pool of over 250,000) as being potentially malicious. Although that is quite low percentage-wise, it is a poorer false-positive showing than many of its rivals.

More worrisome was its inability to clean up malware that has already infected a PC: Webroot's package detected 60% of active malware infections, and managed to render just half of the infections inert. On both fronts, that was the poorest showing of our test group; the majority of the 2012 suites we evaluated were able to detect and disable all active malware infections on our test system. According to Webroot representatives, the company recently made some changes to the way its software cleans up malware infections. That said, we were unable to retest Webroot's claims of improved performance as of press time.

Webroot says that its new cloud-based SecureAnywhere suite is lightweight, and won't hog system resources. For the most part, that claim held true in our testing, as SecureAnywhere was the overall winner in our system-speed tests. Its impact on PC performance was minimal: It added less than half a second to PC startup time (as compared to our test PC with no antivirus installed), and it barely slowed file-download and file-copy operations.

Scan speeds were equally impressive. Webroot's suite completed our on-demand scan test - which shows how long a suite takes to check 4.5GB of files in a manually initiated scan - in a scant 59 seconds. That was easily the fastest time we saw in this particular test compared to its rivals, and it was a full minute better than the average for the suites we looked at. The on-access scanner - which kicks off when you open or save files to disk - tore through 4.5GB of data in 2 minutes, 4 seconds, finishing 30 seconds faster than its nearest competitor. To put that latter test into context, the average completion time for the suites we evaluated was 4 minutes, 48 seconds.

We like Webroot's revised interface, too. Installation is a breeze - open the installer, enter your licence key, and then click 'Agree and Install'. Once installed, the software will check your PC for malware. The main interface is nicely laid out: Five tabs along the left side of the main window let you access the suite's main features. The advanced settings screens can be a little technical in spots, but they too are well organised.