Security Essentials Does Its Job With No Frills

[Lordbob75]

Security Essentials Does Its Job With No Frills

People often turn to me for advice regarding what anti-virus package to get. Usually I recommend McAfee or AVG, but Security Essentials will be my go-to anti-malware package once it’s released from beta. For small-business and home users, the price, performance, and ease-of-use of MSE can’t be beat.
This little app has everything a malware app should. It’s virtually free of bloat, has a small memory footprint and a clear simple interface with just the right amount of control.
Security Essentials is lightweight. The installation download is under 5MB for Vista and Windows 7. At idle on my test system running Windows 7 RC, it only used about 34MB of RAM. While scanning, the memory footprint increased only slightly. Running a quick scan had little impact on my system’s responsiveness. It is clear that Microsoft is addressing people’s biggest complaint about anti-virus software: performance.
Of course, this is all meaningless if the product isn’t effective. Fortunately, preliminary testing shows it to be very effective.
For small organizations with 25 or fewer systems, Security Essentials is a no-brainer. Large organizations will still opt to use products by McAfee and Symantec since Security Essentials will not have the reporting and management control of an enterprise solution. Admins who like the MSE product but support large environments may also want to check out Forefront, Microsoft’s own enterprise security suite which shares its underlying code with Security Essentials.
Hopefully, MSE will follow the path of Windows Defender and be supported by Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) and group policy. This would be the perfect solution for an office large enough to warrant centralized definition updates and configuration, but too small to need an enterprise solution.
It’s clear that Microsoft has a winner here and that it listened to and addressed the needs of its customers.
Michael Scalisi is an IT manager based in Alameda, California.

Security Essentials Does Its Job With No Frills - Business Center - PC World

~Lordbob

 

[pestbest]

Haha, I knew it. Microsoft Security Essentials has everything that an anti-virus needs. It's real time protection works cause it detected a virus when I tried opening an EICAR Test File and it has done a pretty good job clearing the crap out of my computer.

Next step for Microsoft: Powerful Registry Cleaner and Optimizer and a better Defragmenter. And they have to improve internet explorer 8. It is still not that great compared to Firefox RC 3. Once they do that, I think everyone will have a brighter perspective of the Windows OS and Microsoft.

 

[AlexT2889]

That's what I've been wanting for a very long time now... a strong registry cleaner and optimizer...because Microsoft is who created it and knows its entire layout unlike 3rd party developers. I have read somewhere though that the defragmenter built into Windows is much more effective than any other 3rd party app, I found that surprising and guess what I did, I dumped my defrag app I've used for 3 years . I've come to realize anything 3rd party is literally garbage, I've come to rely only on Microsoft products and MSE 1.0 is the best thing ever from Microsoft in a long long time

 

[Slimy]

That's what I've been wanting for a very long time now... a strong registry cleaner and optimizer...because Microsoft is who created it and knows its entire layout unlike 3rd party developers. I have read somewhere though that the defragmenter built into Windows is much more effective than any other 3rd party app, I found that surprising and guess what I did, I dumped my defrag app I've used for 3 years . I've come to realize anything 3rd party is literally garbage, I've come to rely only on Microsoft products and MSE 1.0 is the best thing ever from Microsoft in a long long time

Ever since Vista came out I stopped using defrag programs, registry cleaners, or any other tweaking/cleaning utility. I think I have CCleaner installed somewhere but I use it only once in a while.

 

[Firestrider]

You guys think it is good just to use Windows 7 built in defragmenter? I've tried using it then right after used JkDefrag and it still found a lot of fragments (maybe each program has their own way they want the hard drive organized)

 

[AlexT2889]

You guys think it is good just to use Windows 7 built in defragmenter? I've tried using it then right after used JkDefrag and it still found a lot of fragments (maybe each program has their own way they want the hard drive organized)

Yeah, I've used many defragment programs at once and they all found fragments no matter what, even JKDefragx64 edition. I believe each program has it's own little "home" on the HD and each program can't make up it's mind. So I trust Windows Defragmenter because it knows where the important files are suppose to go that maybe 3rd party app doesn't detect...same idea as a registry cleaner and registry optimizer.