Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Microsoft's free Security Essentials package rates well at removing malware and running light, but what about dealing with brand-new, unidentified bad stuff? Turns out Security Essentials is still the best at figuring out what's bad-while also avoiding annoying false positives."

The AV Comparatives website have released a report detailing the results of how 20 of the main anti virus software products perform when their virus definitions are out of date. The idea behind this is to test the heuristic abilities of the products to detect new viruses that have not been identified or fixed in virus definitions. While the MSE product did not come first, it was the highest performing free product in the tests with a very creditable 5th place.

I installed Windows 7 Home Premium on a netbook I was selling to someone, and I wanted to include anti-virus protection, but didn't want to bog the little thing down. I opted to install Microsoft Security Essentials. As far as AV protection goes, it's fairly light-weight. After installing the software, I was looking in the Action Center, and was surprised to see this message:

It's a bit confusing to show users text about running two antivirus programs, then provide a link telling the user they are in fact running two antivirus programs on the computer. When you click on the link, this is what you see:

Pretty strange, no? This is the default configuration of Microsoft Security Essentials - I didn't change a thing, and this is a 100% vanilla install of Windows 7, with zero third-party apps installed. I don't know why Microsoft would have the configuration work this way, but I can see the average consumer being confused by this. Come on Microsoft, you can do better than this!

"For those not in on the beta or following Microsoft's exciting forays into freeware, the software promises to cover all the security basics and fend off viruses, spyware and other malicious software, and Microsoft even assures us that it'll "run quietly in the background" and only intrude on your life when an action is required."

Microsoft's Security Essentials has only been in beta for three months, but apparently is now ready for public consumption. It is free (for home and non-commercial use), available for most current versions of Windows and is being promptly frowned upon by other PC security vendors like Symantec. It is great to see Microsoft taking a more active approach in protecting Windows based computers, especially with the huge number of compromised computers out there causing untold amounts of harm and skimming everyone's personal information. Reviews have been coming in and so far the objective ones have been fairly positive. Of course, there are a wide variety of free and non-free solutions available, but this just gives people one less reason to not have their PC secured.