When your formerly speedy PC starts to stutter and drag, you may be inclined to pin the blame on your antivirus. Hey, it's an easy target, right? Chances are good, though, that any slowdown is due to things like over-filled hard drives or too many programs running in the background. IObit's Advanced SystemCare Ultimate 9 has the answer for you—it combines antivirus protection with a full suite of system tune-up tools. At $29.99 per year for three licenses, it costs a less than many competing standalone antivirus products. Unfortunately, the core antivirus protection didn't hold up in my testing. 

IObit's main window reports your current security status and features three extra-large glowing icons that launch a Quick, Full, or Custom Scan. Tested on my standard clean virtual machine, the full scan took 26 minutes, which is good, given that the current average is almost 40 minutes. Some antivirus products actively avoid rescanning known good files, making repeat scans very fast. AVG AntiVirus (2016)SEE IT and Total Defense Anti-Virus (2015) zoomed through a repeat scan in about one minute. IObit doesn't seem to attempt this kind of scan optimization.

Easy Start
When you launch IObit's installer, you see a simple screen with one big button that simultaneously accepts the product license and launches the installer. The install process completed. To finish the process, I updated antivirus definitions and activated the product to enable real-time protection.

After I finished activation, the program presented me with a big screen full of additional features and settings, most of which were flagged as enabled. Clicking a link activated the features that weren't enabled by default: Surfing Protection, Registry Deep Clean, and Secure File Deletion.

I noticed that even though I activated the program, it still displayed an advertisement across the bottom, offering me an 80 percent discount on IObit's Drive Booster 3 Pro, along with "super gifts." This kind of internal advertising is found throughout the program. The Action Center notifies you about security problems, but also touts special deals on other IObit products. An Exclusive Offers button on the scan-complete screen likewise takes you to an advertising page. Some users may find these elements annoying.

Mediocre Malware Protection
IObit uses Bitdefender's antivirus engine, so, in a perfect world, its lab-test scores would track precisely with the excellent scores attained by Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2016£19.99 at Bitdefender UK. However, the independent labs state very clearly that test results apply only to the actual product that was tested. None of the labs include IObit in testing, so the only test results I can rely on are my own. My own testing shows that IObit's protection doesn't track with Bitdefender's at all.

To start my malware-blocking test, I open a folder containing my current set of malware samples. The minimal file access that occurs when Windows Explorer checks a file's name, size, and creation date is enough to trigger real-time protection in many antivirus products, including IObit. After a few minutes, it had eliminated 75 percent of the samples. Bitdefender wiped out 79 percent at this point, but the set of samples caught on sight by the two products didn't completely match. IObit missed some that Bitdefender caught, and caught one that Bitdefender missed.