Microsoft Security Essentials - any opinions yet?

[Darat]

Microsoft has just released the final version of Microsoft Security Essentials, and it looks like it is available pretty much world wide, and it is free.

Being in the UK I've not had a chance to look at this until now and given that I will shortly need to renew my "subscription" to my usual anti-virus/anti-malware software I was wondering what folks here think of it?

[oldhat]

I'm downloading a copy right now. It's about time they did something like this.

[GreNME]

I'll be downloading a copy tonight for my Win 7 desktop (to replace MS OnceCare), and I'll let you know how well it performs in terms of CPU usage and general interface. If I get the opportunity (time) to slap together a VM for testing, I'll give it a bit more of a malware test.

[oldhat]

Cool, it comes with scheduling. That's hard to find with freeware.

I've been spending too much money on anti-virus software with disappointing results at work.

Has anyone seen any benchmark results for this software yet?

[GreNME]

Paul Thurrot's take on it (http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/mse.asp)

PCWorld article (http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/product/290838/review/security_essentials_beta.html) (they say the scan is slow)

Computerworld review (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137098/Microsoft_Security_Essentials_Beta_) (some good, some criticism)


After having read those three I'm definitely installing it tonight.

[oldhat]

This thing is great, I'm going to install it on a few computers around the office in a couple of weeks after I read some more reviews/bug reports. 1.0 freaks me out a bit.

[GreNME]

So far, so good. I haven't seen any performance degradation, and considering Win 7 (and Vista) already have a decent anti-spyware and firewall, this pretty much rounds out the necessary protection for a computer with no discernible overhead. I already put it on my laptop as well. I'll give it a shot on some work systems that aren't mission-critical and test them out too, though I'll use my VMs for any actual malware testing.

I'd say if you're thinking about going for it, make sure you meet the minimum system requirements and give it a shot. My three-year-old computer at home exceeds the requirements, if that gives any indication, so meeting them shouldn't be hard.

[moopet]

Paul Thurrot's take on it (http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/mse.asp)
...
After having read those three I'm definitely installing it tonight.

I just read that review and it seems to make some rather strange points. I don't know how well this guy is repeating the MS line, because I haven't looked it up, but he seems pretty keen - he certainly repeats phrases about MS's amazing security record a lot.

Most critically, it claims that users currently don't activate or extend or even really know about the bundled anti-virus products which most manufacturers are bribed to put on new machines. It is designed to address that. But it will never be bundled with a machine, people will have to find out about it and visit the MS site, find a download and install it themselves. If they can't do the former, how can they do the latter? This sounds like extremely poor reasoning.

In short, without trying it myself I have no opinion. I do know that OneCare, which it's supposedly based on, was pretty bad (my experience goes up to about a year ago, so it could be wonderful and shiny and full of unicorns by now, but hey) in that it didn't find a lot of problems the other packages did, wasas obnoxiously obtrusive as Norton, McAfee et al, and could be disabled rather too easily. MSE seems to be much less gaudy and bloated, which is good.

Given a choice, I think I'd still prefer my malware solution to come from an independant, third-party organisation. Historically MS's efforts have been rubbish (see Defender) or disorganised (see MSRT) or simply way too late (see a cartoon calendar with animated red Xs appearing on it float above my head)

[GreNME]

In short, without trying it myself I have no opinion. I do know that OneCare, which it's supposedly based on, was pretty bad (my experience goes up to about a year ago, so it could be wonderful and shiny and full of unicorns by now, but hey) in that it didn't find a lot of problems the other packages did, wasas obnoxiously obtrusive as Norton, McAfee et al, and could be disabled rather too easily. MSE seems to be much less gaudy and bloated, which is good.

Interesting. I've been using OneCare since version 1 and haven't considered it bad at all. While the first iteration was weak on heuristics in testing and the integration wasn't really much better than other 3rd-party offerings, subsequent versions of it grew by leaps and bounds in terms of performance as well as accuracy. In fact, I believe that AV Comparatives (http://www.av-comparatives.org/) had it graded as "advanced" earlier this year, though I don't believe that OneCare ever had the top listing in any of the years it's been compared. I will say, though, that OneCare's performance overall was never good enough to place it above the long-standing big names in A/V, but OneCare did create a huge splash on the market-- prior to OneCare being sold, I can't think of any commercials antivirus that was available for a single-license cost that could be installed on more than one home computer (explicitly allowed in OneCare's EULA). In fact, I'd go as far to posit that the reason Symantec and McAffee changed their licensing model to allow for up to 3-5 home computers to have their retail software install was in direct response to OneCare's doing so since it came out in 2006.

Overall, since the MSE engine is pretty much the same as was in OneCare-- this is something I've had confirmed by more than just online articles-- that means the antivirus engine isn't going to be the outright leader in A/V testing or performance comparisons, but it looks to be good enough for the average user out there and its being a free (non-advertising and able to be scheduled) offering is going to hopefully make it so more computers out there are actually protected on a basic level. At work, I'm definitely more impressed with the commercial offering from Kaspersky in terms of performance and central management, but for the typical home user I have no problem letting people know they can grab this for free if they're looking for a low-cost option (and coupled with Defender it offers pretty good coverage for no cost).