A new and free antivirus – Microsoft Security Essentials

Need a free antivirus for your Windows PC? Well guess what, Microsoft just released a free antivirus called Microsoft Security Essentials which provides real time protection for  your PC which guards against viruses, spyware and other malicious software.

This free antivirus can be installed on genuine Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

The following is a list of antivirus software I have personally tried before:

• Norton Antivirus
• Bitdefender
• AVG
• Avira
• McAfee
• Avast

Out of these six antivirus software, try to guess which one is currently installed on my machine?

Well, it’s Avast Home Edition and the reason being:

• It effectively detects and catches viruses and malwares for me.
• Every time a friend or colleague has a virus problem, getting them to install Avast seems to help.
• It does not affect my daily computing tasks in anyway. Meaning it doesn’t slow down the speed of the PC.

Now that Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is out, I feel I should at least give it a try.

In today’s post, I will write about my experience using Microsoft’s free antivirus. While I’m writing this post, I will uninstall Avast and attempt to install MSE.

1. Avast was uninstalled successfully, after which Windows security alerts immediately warned about not finding an antivirus software on my computer.
2. Downloaded Microsoft Security Essentials (4.29mb only)
3. Started the installer
4. After clicking Next, the installer will check if I’ve got a genuine version of Windows. In my case it was genuine and was allowed to proceed.
5. The installation completed, after which it immediately ran an update to obtain the latest virus and spyware definitions status.
6. One things for sure, downloading the updates take a longer time than installing it. More than 30 minutes! Maybe due to my slow internet connection.
7. 

Now that Microsoft Security Essentials is installed. I will continue to let it run on my machine. If my machine encounters any strange behaviors or slowdown, I’ll definitely switch back to Avast. But for now, I will rely on Microsoft Security Essentials to keep my machine safe from virus threats. Hopefully it does a good job and can continue to remain on my machine.

* Updated 6th October 2009

Yesterday, my wife told me that her thumb drive infected her machine with a virus. Her machine has Avast installed. I then hook up the thumb drive into my machine and have Microsoft Security Essentials scan it. Guess what, a worm called VBS/Slogod.F was caught.

Clicking on the clean computer button killed and removed the worm / virus from the thumb drive. Good job Microsoft Security Essentials!

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