1st October 2009
A Review of Microsoft Security Essentials
Today I installed a copy of Microsoft’s Security Essentials software. It provides real-time protection for your home PC against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. The installation was easy and only took a couple of minutes. The interface for the software is dead simple and is perfect for the home user. One complaint that we always had with Microsoft’s other foray into the antispyware world, Windows Defender, was that it never updated itself correctly with new definitions. This product looks a lot more refined then Windows Defender and hope it updates correctly.
One of the selling points that Microsoft has been touting is this software’s small footprint compared to other commercial products, we did not find that to be the case. While running normally without any other activity on the computer it was still using around 45 MB of memory. Avast, another free home antivirus product which we like, uses are 55 MB. 45 MB is not a ton of memory on computers these days which have 2 GB or more of memory, but I wouldn’t call it a small footprint.
One thing that we weren’t able to test is how it actually dealt with viruses or spyware If you have a virus that you would like to send us to test you can send it to….not really, we will wait until we find one out in the wilds of the internet. Until then I would say go ahead and download it yourself if you are a looking for a free antivirus/antispyware suite.
Leave a Reply
To reply to this article, please enter your name and write your comment in the textbox below. Some HTML tags are allowed, but others will be stripped if you enter them in your comments.
You must be logged in to post a comment.