Windows Defender was doing so bad for so long in AVtest.org that MS withdrew them from the test program.
https
/www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/home-windows/windows-8/
Kaspersky scored 5.0 / 5.0 in all 3 categories, no one else did.... we moved to Kaspersky a year ago from Bitdefender
June 2015 - Defender scored 0.5 outta 5.0 in protection ... 3.0 / 5.0 in performance. While protection is important ... if it takes 10 seconds to open every file, than that also impacts the bottom line.
https
/www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/home-windows/windows-8/june-2015/
Protection against 0-day malware attacks, inclusive of web and e-mail threats (Real-World Testing) - (
90.2% / 81.7%)
Detection of widespread and prevalent malware discovered in the last 4 weeks (the AV-TEST reference set) - (
85.5% / 95.2%)
If you can be satisfied with only 5 - 20% of infections out in the wild getting onto your system, the you will be just fine. About 2 years ago, I cleaned my sister in law's PC, she used Windows Defender and as far as she (and Windows Defender) was concerned, it was fine. I downloaded a free trial of Bitdefender ....and 3.5 hours later, It had disinfected over 1200 infections, some of which I had to do manually.
Malware Bytes, Spybot etc. are all very fine utilities .... **for the price**. But the "you get what you pay for" adage applies. Certainly good enough for a home user that has pictures on their kids, games and old tax returns on their PC and has them backed up to other media. Certainly not by any means on a box that you make living on, where "time is money". But is it really worthwhile "cheaping out" instead of investing $10 to protect your livelihood ? Site licenses are available from $2 - $10 per seat.
What is your time worth ? .... In a production environment ... the cost of recovering from an infection starts at about $500 per box. Not worth risking when you can be made safe for $10 a seat or less.
Now all that being said, on our SOHO systems ... on the SO side, we have not been infected even once in the last 25+ years. A lot of that has to do with educating users; we have had about 12 - 15 instances of files being detected that never made it onto our systems and 2 false positives.
On the HO side, the kids never got seriously infected but they did install some malware "sharing' stuff w/ friends that 'got last the free stuff" ... It was easier to just reinstall the OS every year than to deal with that. Once they hit 12 or so that ended. The wifie was a tougher deal ... we had to move her over to the office side as she has a biological urge to click on anything that says "Free"
Now that site licenses are so cheap, we just have everyone on Kaspersky.
And yes, if you try to install malware, it
most certainly will block it. After a recent game patch, KA started blocking the game ... after confirming worth KA that it was a false positive, I had to do a ON / OFF dance (Turn AV off, launch game, turn AV back on) each time I loaded it. KA fixed it after about 2 days of being reported.
The FileForum site was always a good place to get security software. Since dumping BitDefender, they keep offering me 5 seats for $17.95 ... KA is now $49 for 5 seats on the USA site
http/usa.kaspersky.com/homepage
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