What to make of Microsoft Security Essentials?

[Doug]

On my conventional desktop Vista PCs I have been using ESET Smart security
(supplemented by daily backups and occasional scans with Ad-Aware, Windows
Defender and Malwarebytes Anti-malware), but with the emergence from beta
yesterday of Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE)downloadable and free from:

http://www.microsoft.com/Security_essentials/

I am wondering whether to settle for that instead. Indeed I am wondering
whether MSE hasn't effectively blown the other security suites out of the
water, and, if so, is whether that is a good thing or not.

I have just installed MSE, a very well behaved install. Interestingly on
first install the Security Center showed MSE installed as well as Windows
Defender, but after a re-start, Windows Defender had gone. MSE has done a
quick scan taking a few minutes and I now have it doing a full scan which
has been running for 45 minutes and looks as though it will take several
hours.

I am rather hoping that a side effect of changing to MSE will be that
Windows Live Mail is cured from its occasional lock-ups. I am already
encouraged by signs of increased sprightliness there.

Normally I am put off by Microsoft expanding their monopoly, but in this
case they seem to have produced an impressive product, and I am slightly
kicking myself for having signed up with ESET for three years covering two
PCs.

Doug

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

On my conventional desktop Vista PCs I have been using ESET Smart security
(supplemented by daily backups and occasional scans with Ad-Aware, Windows
Defender and Malwarebytes Anti-malware), but with the emergence from beta
yesterday of Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE)downloadable and free from:

http://www.microsoft.com/Security_essentials/

I am wondering whether to settle for that instead.

In my view, a single day is much too short a time to make a decision
about how it compares to the competition.

 

[Anton Kolakov]

On my conventional desktop Vista PCs I have been using ESET Smart
security (supplemented by daily backups and occasional scans with
Ad-Aware, Windows Defender and Malwarebytes Anti-malware), but with the
emergence from beta yesterday of Microsoft Security Essentials
(MSE)downloadable and free from:

http://www.microsoft.com/Security_essentials/

I am wondering whether to settle for that instead. Indeed I am wondering
whether MSE hasn't effectively blown the other security suites out of
the water, and, if so, is whether that is a good thing or not.

So long as it is always free it's a good thing. I just made a post about
my opinion of it so you can read that. Overall it is good but it is
missing some needed features and already quarantined two harmless files
on my Win7 PC. In XP it is using way too much cpu resources whenever I
open an explorer folder with files in it but never had the same issue on
Win7 64bit. Only reason I put it on XP is because bloody Avira updates
were just way too slow so blew it away and installed MSSE instead.