Microsoft Security Essentials

[Jeff7181]

Anyone seen any reviews on its detection rate and ability to clean/remove harmful files compared to other suites?

*EDIT* I've been finding feature comparisons, but nothing about its ability to detect/clean.

 

[j0j081]

I think it did very well in one set of tests I read a couple months back. I can't remember what site did them though. I'm sure there will be a lot more in the coming weeks as it was just officially released yesterday. I switched from Norton 09 Gaming Edition to it and have been extremely impressed. It blocked a few bad webpages Norton had been missing for months.

 

[pcgeek11]

From a posting on slashdot:

"Microsoft's new free security software, Windows Security Essentials, passed a preliminary antivirus exam with flying colors, said independent and trusted firm AV-Test, which tested Essentials, launched yesterday in beta, on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. It put it up against nearly 3,200 common viruses, bot Trojans and worms, said Andreas Marx, one of the firm's managers. The malware was culled from the most recent WildList, a list of threats actually actively attacking computers. 'All files were properly detected and treated by the product,' Marx said in an e-mail. 'That's good, as several other [antivirus] scanners are still not able to detect and kill all of these critters yet.' It also tested well on false positives."

 

[GrumpyMan]

How does it compare to Avira Antivir Personal?

 

[Jeff7181]

Good to hear... I installed it on my mother's Atom powered netbook and there's no change in performance that I could detect and she hasn't complained about it yet either so looks to be plenty light-weight. Hopefully it stands up to more tests that are thrown at it.

I always said, if anyone can create a security suite to protect Windows, it's Microsoft. I'm happy to see them providing a free product to do so.

 

[Scouzer]

It's detection rates are very poor even compared to lackluster performers like AVG:

http://www.av-comparatives.org...ndret/avc_report23.pdf

I would not recommend this program. A 90% detection rate is abhorrent.

Keep in mind this is from a sample library of 1.6 million; The AV-Test was only 3200 which is not a large enough statistical sample.

 

[dguy6789]

A review that I read yesterday that I saw on Google News(which I conveniently can not find at the moment) said that Avira has better detection rates and is faster at scanning than either AVG or MSE. It did say that MSE is pretty much identical to AVG in terms of performance though. Paul Thurrott has a very highly praising review of MSE. http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/mse.asp He says that MSE is incredibly non intrusive, non annoying, very tiny memory footprint, which sounds great to me.

Personally I think Anti virus should be the OS manufacturer's job in the first place. Protection from threats should be integrated into the OS. Microsoft can't do that due to legal issues, so MSE is the next best thing; free AV from Microsoft for a Microsoft OS.

 

[eggrolls]

Originally posted by: Scouzer
It's detection rates are very poor even compared to lackluster performers like AVG:

http://www.av-comparatives.org...ndret/avc_report23.pdf

I would not recommend this program. A 90% detection rate is abhorrent.

Keep in mind this is from a sample library of 1.6 million; The AV-Test was only 3200 which is not a large enough statistical sample.

But this is MSE, not OneCare... or are you saying they're the same in detection rates?

 

[armstrda]

That av-comparitives is running teh old OneCare 2.5 which is a different product than the new MSE.

 

[Scouzer]

Originally posted by: eggrolls

Originally posted by: Scouzer
It's detection rates are very poor even compared to lackluster performers like AVG:

http://www.av-comparatives.org...ndret/avc_report23.pdf

I would not recommend this program. A 90% detection rate is abhorrent.

Keep in mind this is from a sample library of 1.6 million; The AV-Test was only 3200 which is not a large enough statistical sample.

But this is MSE, not OneCare... or are you saying they're the same in detection rates?

Ah, that's my error. I thought they were the same product, just Onecare was the name of the beta. Disregard, I don't know enough about MSE.

 

[dguy6789]

I've been trying it out all day so far. I can't really say anything about how secure it is but I can say I absolutely adore the user interface. It blows AVG and Avira away. It installs extremely quick and requires no settings to be changed at all. Just install and it's done.

 

[nerp]

Yes, install and it's done and it leaves you alone. And it's free. Can't ask for much more.