Microsoft Security Essentials

Hello!

This has been a long time in coming and with this post I do apologize for the recent sparsity and brevity of the content.  Things have been really crazy to say the least.

First of all, I have a shiny new job and it has been great! My position is basically the same as what it always has been, but there is an extra emphasis on getting out and making face time with our clients – this is great and I am working with a really great group of guys that are all dedicated to their craft.

Anyway, enough of that. Let’s get on with today’s topic which is kind of a product review/plug for Microsoft’s latest entry into the antivirus market – Microsoft Security Essentials.

For years, I have been looking for the perfect free antivirus solution to recommend to my home clients and it seemed all of the offerings seemed to come up short in one area or another. While all of them did do their basic job, it seemed that each had some particular annoyance that was just short of being irritating enough to uni9nstall the product.

AVG Free, for example did a reasonable job of scanning and catching viruses and was easy to download and install, but it seemed that the virus updates were always popping up and new clients released far too often for my tastes.  Often the transition to the new client meant uninstalling the previous version completely in order to have the update complete successfully.

On the other hand, Avast suffers from faults in the ease of use category. Actually getting your hands on the product involved a myriad of fill in fields on their webpage and then you actually were forced to register the product with a valid email. This made it particularly cumbersome to install for clients as I really did not want to register in my name, nor did I want to give the pc back with Avast not registered.  Equally annoying is the daily verbal broadcast saying “Virus database has been updated.” This has made the neighbours set their whiskey glasses down a few times when it blasted out of my home theatre PC speakers at 2:00 in the morning.

As for Avira, I don’t have a lot of experience with it, but I do recall that I found the product a little unwieldly. Kaspersky is a swear word around here and that is all I will say about it. (Happy BSOD to all of you Kaspersky lovers out there.)

So, here we are. I can’t believe that I am doing this, but I am going to come out and fully recommend a Microsoft antivirus product.  Microsoft Security Essentials is great.  It is easy to download, installs very quickly, does not ask for a bunch of unnecessary information, runs silently in the background, updates itself and basically does not let you know it is there. And as an added bonus, it actually catches viruses too!

This hits the mark and is exactly what I have been looking for. I recommend that all of my readers that are running another free product give this a try – it is great.

The installer package itself can be downloaded here

http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/default.aspx?mkt=en-us#dlbutton 

Click on run, and within minutes you will be protected.  It couldn’t get much easier.

The only hitch will be for those of you not running a legit copy of Windows. You will be out of luck on this one as Microsoft does verify authenticity as part of the install.

Please everyone who actually installs this, let me know what you think.

Cheers!