I'd have to say it isn't particularly good at it - at least, I've had
to clean up a dozen or so systems for friends and family that were
running MSE but were infected by rootkits. Granted, that was a while
back (but within the past year) so they could be better at it by now
but I don't know that I'd trust them. No, scratch that, I know I
wouldn't trust them - I run Avast on my computers, and replaced MSE
with Avast on systems I've cleaned, and never had one get infected by a
rootkit (or other malware, for that matter).
Years ago, MS had the reputation of doing lots of things, they just
didn't do any of them well.
If I was still a regular Windows user, I'd use something else too, for
my personal stuff. These days, I tend to put MSE on instead, as the
eventual user I see just isn't knowledgeable enough to start them out
with something more capable. They tend to find it confusing.
Just a couple days ago, was helping a lady with her first computer. She
only bought it because someone told her she needed one. And, I mean a
newbie, here. She didn't know what a desktop or a window was. Or, how
to manipulate windows. Her computer is Vista, so I showed her the
computer basics that was installed in the help system, and set her to
reading that.
--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.6.8
Firefox 10.0.2
Thunderbird 10.0.2
LibreOffice 3.5.0 rc3
