Microsoft Security Essentials - Uninstall Completely

How to Completely Uninstall Microsoft Security Essentials​

   Information

This tutorial will guide you through removing Microsoft Security Essentials completely from your machine, either so you may reinstall it or make sure everything is cleaned up to move to a new anti-virus.

This guide assumes you have no antivirus protection installed at the moment. If you do, disable it during this guide as it may interfere with this procedure.

   Warning

Always Uninstall Microsoft Security Essentials the proper way through Control Panel - Uninstall A Program when possible. DO NOT FOLLOW THIS TUTORIAL IF YOU HAVE WINDOWS 8 or WINDOWS 10, IT WILL CORRUPT WINDOWS DEFENDER.

Then continue to this method. If the uninstaller fails for whatever reason, then attempt this method.

   Information

Microsoft security essentials is now called windows defender in windows 8 and windows 10. They are the same product now, providing anti-virus and anti-spyware protection. Windows Defender in windows 7 and Vista is just anti-spyware protection.

1.) First, download the Microsoft Security Essentials removal tool fix it here:

Download


Source: How can I uninstall Microsoft Security Essentials from my computer?
2.) Close all programs. Open the fix it file you just downloaded.

3.) The utility opens, Choose I agree, then click next to uninstall like in the picture below.

4.) The program will start to be removed. During the process you will see this image:

5.) Choose Close to finish and then restart the PC.

6.) You're finished!

Related Tutorials

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• How to Completely Uninstall Avast Antivirus
• How to Completely Uninstall Norton/Symantec Products
• How to Completely Uninstall AVG
• How to Completely Uninstall IOBIT Products

 

[Davor]

@mcmanimal, your solution (almost) worked for me. On my wife's laptop with Win 7 I tried many other things, but to no avail. There was a snag, however, merely renaming the folder from Hirens resulted with something odd - Windows recognised folder name change, and adjusted shortcuts accordingly (!) so I started Hirens again and deleted it from there. It did it.
After cleaning the remains in ccleaner, it couldn't delete two registry entries, so I tried it manually. No success. Even after attacking them from regedit running as system - nothing. Thank God viruses are not this resilient.

I have no idea why I couldn't uninstall it "normal way". I was OK with it to the point it couldn't be updated for a "different language installation" problem, and first I tried few possible languages it could have been installed from. I even tried reinstalling the original version that was still there in a "downloads" folder, but nothing happened. So it had to go.