The long-awaited Microsoft Security Essentials have been released. Free download, replaces Windows Defender, scans for all kinds of viruses, spyware, & malware.
Journalists who have used the prerelease builds say it’s awesome. I’m just conducting a full scan on my system, seems to work the same as Defender from a user perspective. Discuss!
Think it’s a nice idea myself suprised that the Virus guard people haven’t tried to do an Opera and whinge about the OS maker putting what, up until now, has been 3rd party functionality into its OS.
Yeah, I can’t wait for the inevitable appeals to the European Union because evil Microsoft tries to kill Norton’s bloatware…
Status report: MSE is just as slow as Defender when it comes to scanning files, unfortunately. A full scan of ~60 GB took a whopping 1.5 hours… ouch!
Ouch. Does the search for a lightweight, unobtrusive virusguard (that doesn’t decide to kick off a scan just as you step into Ulduar) go on?
Any word yet on how well this handles spyware? Preventive anti-malware software that actually works would be pretty exciting.
I’m likening it quite a bit so far. The footprint is as small as Avira’s, plus there are no nag screens.
An hour and a half passed and still no end in sight for the full scan. Makes me think I’ll just rely on real-time protection in the future instead of regular scans.
Haven’t found anything bad yet, but neither did my previous antivirus nod32. I do keep a fairly clean system, so I have no idea to the effectiveness of MSE. But I’ll give it a shot.
I must admit I’ve always been sceptical about the need to run scans, especially now sitting on home networks or just having PCs with terrabytes of disk space/data are concerned.
Making the dangerous assumption that you’re starting with clean disks/data to begin with, what value is there in having your virus guard render your PC unusable for several hours once a week/month while it trawls your disks?
If it didn’t spot the virus on the way in, why is it any more likely to find it during a scan?
I guess there’s the small window of opportunity between a new virus being released and the definitions being updated to detect it but is it worth the loss of time or the need to leave your PC chugging away while you go do something else.
And I’m talking purely about single user or home network environments rather than enterprise solutions.
Yeah, all AV products take too long to do a full scan, imo. I rely on the real-time protection and quick scans about once a week.
I suspect I’ve got something untowards happening on my home PC, even though I don’t use IE, don’t download any software, use only web-based e-mail without macros, etc. Can I download this tool at work, install it on a USB stick, and then plug the USB stick in at home and have it run; or does it require “installation” on the target PC thus making itself vulnerable to compromise?
Thanks.
It doesn’t come in a portable version, so you are probably better off looking for another on-demand product.
So I uninstalled avira and tried this out last night on one of my pc’s. This is a pretty empty 640gb hdd (a recent win 7 clean install). The initial quick scan took like 15 min. Doing another scan immediately took like 10 seconds so it is at least kind of smart about what it needs to rescan.
How long does it take to read 60 GB off the disk?
I already have NOD32 on my primary system, but I’ll have to try this on my laptop, since I didn’t feel like buying another license for it so it’s still unprotected at the moment.
SuperAntiSpyware can do that.
I’m generally anti-anti-spyware for my own use as I see the cure as being worse than the disease in most cases. I’d rather have my system completely owned and have to reformat it once a year than deal with the death-by-a-thousand-cuts annoyances of running the usual suspect “security” software. Of course, with minimally careful computer usage, I don’t actually get owned every year, I think I’ve had maybe 2 virus infections (2 that were ever noticable, that is) ever and the first one was way back on the Amiga.
However, having had good experiences with Windows Defender, I checked this out as soon as it was publicly available and my impression of it is similarly favorable. I’m not going to actively try to infect my system to see how well it works against a real threat, so I can’t speak to that aspect of it yet, but it has stayed well out of my way thus far, which is important to me. The fact that it takes a long time to do a scan is insignificant to me because while it is scanning my system remains perfectly usable. I’d much rather have it take longer to scan if the tradeoff is that it isn’t pegging all the resources in my quadcore system while it is scanning. It seems to strike the right balance in terms of speed vs resource usage, at least for me.
Cool man, thanks.
Good LORD that’s slow. I’m using it and a full scan of my roughly 180GB of hard drive data takes less maybe an hour.
Once you’ve done the full scan, quick scans are super fast.
Been using it for a couple months and it’s pretty good. Seems at least as good as the other free options.