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Question, guys. I've had Malwarebytes for sometime and so far I've liked it. What do you guys think of Trend Micro? I've heard having both are good for the best protection.

(With Trend Micro you have to renew & pay every year but Malwarebytes is a pay one time only deal, so I kept Malwarebytes and let Trend Micro go.)

TrendMicro is one of the better premium anti-viruses, but it still will not catch everything. Most attacks nowadays package so many viruses and trojans together, that it is nearly impossible for any one antivirus suite to detect and remove everything.

What will usually happen is that your paid anti-virus that runs all the time, like TrendMicro, will detect some of the malware and remove it, while leaving others in place. So when you see that “Virus detected and quarantined” thing pop up, you should really break out MalwareBytes and other free utilities and do a full scan to see what else is still infecting you. The premium antivirus is more like an “early warning system” than anything else.

Actually, for an either/ or choice between Trend Micro and MalwareBytes, a better choice would be to keep TM and ditch MB. They are for completely different purposes with TM providing antivirus + firewall and MB being a malware cleaner after the computer is infected. Antivirus/firewall are defense against a malware infection occurring. Separate from a malware infection though, the are some varieties of ad pop ups that can get past the blocking and if this is too a annoying then AdAware is a good product to stomp them down a bit more.

For example, for my previous Windows 7 computer and for my current Windows 8.1 computer, I run TM and instead of MB use a registry maintenance program called ARO. Since switching to TM plus having Windows firewall enabled, I have never had a malware infection so ended up removing MB. In addition, I have the Internet Explorer firewall enabled, have the IE set to clear cookies and history when exiting plus the IE malware removal tool runs once per month during the routine update check.

A bonus is that for the TM yearly fee, it includes several licenses so I have TM running on the Windows PC laptop, my iPhone and an Apple MacBook Air. Heck, I even ran TM on my Kindle before it busted. Once on the Kindle, TM blocked installation of a new App when it detected embedded malware code.