Safety Peak Anti-Malware is a small on demand scanner that does one thing very well which is detecting viruses. In fact, the program protects from over 561,969 threats right after installation and without an update. This makes Safety Peak perfect for computers that might have had their winsock lsp files damaged (cannot connect to the internet) and need a way to detect and delete the virus that caused it. Safety Peak Anti-Malware also includes a history (quarantine area) to restore false positives and offers fast scanning. One disadvantage is the program’s interface so expect a barebones experience.
The installation of Safety Peak was quick. The program download size was 12 megabytes in size. This is fairly large considering that the Safety Peak only includes an on demand scanner and not a real time protection engine. However, upon investigating the definition file (22.6 megabytes in size) one can deduce that in lieu have not having a real time engine, the program really does offer comprehensive detection capabilities. One strange thing that I encountered was after I updated the virus definitions, the number of known threats didn’t update. Perhaps Safety Peak isn’t updating their definitions daily.
Scanning for viruses with Safety Peak is pretty straightforward; simply hit the scan button. Unfortunately, it is difficult to select whether one wants a custom scan and a quick scan is not available. However, it is possible to customize what is scanned aka files, registry items, processes, folders, host file entries, and cookies. The actual scanning process is above the average free antivirus performance. According to Windows Resource Monitor, Safety Peak scans between 3 to 4 megabytes per second. A full system scan also takes about 1 and half hours to complete. A disadvantage to the scanning process is that drives other than the OS (C: drive) are scanned first. Safety Peak didn’t detect any false positives or viruses on the test system.
As far as resource usage goes, Safety Peak is also average. During scanning, the program’s peak usage was 60 megabytes of RAM and about 12 percent CPU power. While idle, Safety Peak consumed the same amount of memory. These numbers are all within main stream free antivirus specs.
Other than basic core antivirus scanning Safety Peak doesn’t offer much else. If one has a specific virus infection check it out, otherwise download an antivirus with always on protection capability.
