An important survey since till now there have been no comparative tests from neutral and at least somewhat authoritative sources which pits leading AV solutions against each other.
MSE (using the Beta) was one of 6 that was rated Advanced+ (the highest rating). Only MSE, eScan and Symantec rated "good" in malware detection and cleanup. Broadly that means that each of those 3 detected all the malware thrown at them and all removed the main functionality of those nasties but left behind a mixed bag of remnants after the cleanup - including (commonly) an unfixed hosts file.
The Malware included a range of nasties found in the wild - many will be familiar to anyone helping their (friends!) fix security problems on their computers - and know how difficult it is to remove some of this stuff.
It should be noted that this was a "Malware" test not a "Virus test" - but I think AV-Comparatives got it right doing that first coz we were really in the dark on that side of things.
The actual
REPORT is a pretty easy read, and well worthwhile.
Please note this was not (as implied by the title of this post), A "vote" - it was a series of tests, weighted and scored.
So despite Norton's very negative attack on MSE and free AV solutions it is more and more looking like there is nothing "lightweight" about MSE (except its footprint and resource usage), that full price favorites like ESET will not necessarily perform as well in the realworld and that free favorites Avast and Avira (for example) may be outperformed by Johnny-come-lately MSE.
Users of MSE will expect that MSE will do really well in the anti-virus stakes too. Looking forward to some decent tests there too.
(as a footnote - Escan seem to be onto something. Where Escan removed malware it did so way better - ie perfectly - than all the other solutions - but it failed to remove 2 of the items of malware at all. That's a fatal result - but maybe they are close to getting this right).
Users of Avira and Avast can feel moderately at ease to know that their solutions removed all the test nasties (though imperfectly). AVG missed one malware sample and removed the rest imperfectly.
Of course a different set of Malware examples may have given a completely different set of results (may not have too) so at the end of the day this is all just indicative!
I'm bumping this post with these comments coz there is so much discussion here about the AV solutions people use - much of which is based on impressions (like "it's got a nice interface") whereas these are some pretty rigorous tests.
