Unlike other antivirus programs, which install virus-scanning technology and lists of known security threats on your local hard drive, Webroot SecureAnywhere Complete 2012 sends the data to a remote server over the internet, which does the scanning for you.
This means that your computer doesn't use any of its resources at all, making the remote computer (along with your internet connection) do all the legwork.
The results are incredibly impressive - a full system scan of multiple hard drives took just 12 seconds, with CPU usage staying around 11 per cent and peaking at 27 per cent. A scan of 13,403 files across a number of different hard drives all installed in the same machine took an astounding 30 seconds to complete.
With some antivirus programs you may notice that your computer takes slightly longer to start up, due to the program being loaded into Windows. This can be incredibly frustrating, so it's a great relief to see that Webroot SecureAnywhere Complete 2012 hardly affects startup speeds at all.
The SecureAnywhere program itself only takes up around 700k of memory when running - a remarkably small amount for an antivirus tool.
If you're sick of your computer running more slowly with an antivirus product installed, SecureAnywhere is definitely worth checking out. While a lot of antivirus products have improved their footprints in recent years, Webroot SecureAnywhere is easily the lightest we've seen.
This doesn't necessarily mean that other features have been cut. While SecureAnywhere isn't as feature-rich as McAfee All Access 2012 or Kaspersky ONE Internet Security, it still has some decent extra features, such as a firewall, system cleaner and a sandboxing tool.
This enables you to run programs in a safe environment, limiting their access to system files and settings should they be malicious. It's an incredibly useful feature that we always welcome in antivirus programs.
Keeping with the cloud focus, SecureAnywhere also includes some decent backup and synchronisation tools.
Verdict
This is an extremely fast and light program that does an excellent job of keeping your PC secure.
Of course, the asking price of £50 in the UK and $80 in the US is quite a lot, and though it does cover three PCs for one year, it is still more expensive than most of its competitors. Still, the performance was so good that if you have an elderly computer that strains under bloated antivirus programs, we can't recommend this highly enough.
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