When it comes to free security solutions for Windows, users have a lot of options. From Microsoft’s own offering Microsoft Security Essentials, to often recommended solutions like Avast Free Antivirus or AVG Anti-Virus Free. Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free is another program that often gets recommended by security experts for its excellent ability to detect and remove malware from a system.

Make sure you download the free version of the of the program. If you want, you can select to run a free trial of the professional version but that is not really necessary to protect your system.  The core difference is that the pro version comes with realtime protection, while the free version with on-demand scanning only.

After you have installed the program you can start it up right away. First thing that you will notice after starting it up for the first time is that the program database is automatically updated so that the latest malware definitions are available on the system.

Once that has been taken care of, you can use the built-in scanner to scan your system for malware. as usually, there are several scan options available. You can either select to run a quick scan that looks at important locations and running programs, or a full scan to scan every single file of the system. The quick scan should not take longer than a few minutes to complete.

You can also check out the program settings to make a few modifications to the inner-workings of the program.  Here it is for instance possible to password protect the program, terminate internet explorer during threat removal, or disable the sending of anonymous statistics to the company that is developing the program.

I’d suggest you run Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free regularly to make sure your system is not infected by malware.