Late last year Microsoft produced ‘Microsoft Security Essentials‘ an antivirus, anti-malware offering aimed, free, at home users. The licence agreement also covers home based small businesses.
According to Microsoft around 50 to 60 percent of Windows users do not have a security solution installed. That’s a scary statistic given the volume of virus, trojans, spyware and rootkits. This product is aimed at that sector, however Microsoft wants to avoid antitrust issues with competitors in the security industry. This probably explains the lack of visibility of the product. The first hit in a search for ‘antivirus’ on their website is a ‘list of antivirus vendors’. Microsoft Security Essentials gets a look in further down the page.
Microsoft Security Essentials works with Windows XP, Vista and 7. The installation requires a Windows validation check and as usual should not be installed with any other antivirus package. (Of course Immunet in the cloud is an exception as it’s not running on your local machine). It uninstalls Windows Defender if present.
Security Essentials builds on Windows Defender by providing real time protection and on demand scanning for all types of malware. I have been running the package for some time now. The software is very unobtrusive, using idle time scanning, smart caching and active memory swapping so that I never notice any slow down in computer performance.