If you’re tired of sluggish antivirus tools taking forever to scan your system, then you’re not alone.

But the good news is that at least the security vendors are finally listening. Emsisoft today became the latest company to announce major performance improvements, with the claim that their new Anti-Malware 6 is now on average 450% faster than before. And by making smarter decisions about what it checks, the program continues to get faster with every scan.

Anti-Malware 6’s real-time protection has also seen optimisations, delivering faster boot times and reducing any performance impact of the file guard.

A new direct disk access mode should deliver far better rootkit detection.

And there are the usual scattering of smaller, but still welcome changes everywhere you look. A new internal rating system aims to reduce false positives, for instance; if a scheduled scan is missed then there’s now an option to run it when the program next starts; and the interface has been tweaked and reorganised in several places to make the program generally easier to use.

So how does Anti-Malware 6 behave in real life? It’s relatively bulky, consuming anything up to 250MB of RAM when scanning, and even now can take some time to run (a first Smart Scan required some 20 minutes on our test system). It’s thorough, though, detecting all our test samples (though with a couple of false positives thrown in).

As with previous editions, you can install Anti-Malware 6 as a limited free version, which gives you the ability to scan and clean your system only.

Alternatively, purchase a licence for $40 (or €40) and you’ll also get real-time protection, including on-access file scanning, behaviour monitoring, surfing protection and more.

And if you’re unsure, no problem: you can run a trial of the full system for 30 days, and switch to the free version at the end of that time if you decide that’s sufficient.