First Look at Microsoft Security Essentials
By Jin Nan Goto
Back in November Microsoft announced that it will no longer sell Microsoft Live OneCare on June 30 and that the anti-virus aspect of OneCare will be replaced with a free Antivirus product codenamed “Morro”. Today a beta version of Morro has been released by Microsoft as Microsoft Security Essentials. The beta was released in 4 countries United states, Israel, Brazil and China.
I installed it on a couple of my machines and it seems to follow Microsoft’s claim that this is a leaner Antivirus with a low memory and processor footprint. The interface is very clean and simple as opposed to other anti-virus software. Overall it seems like a very good solution for a free anti-virus.
Screenshots
Installation went very smoothly. Although there were a lot more prompts than I would have liked.
Microsoft Security Essentials will only on validated Windows machines so it makes you pass validation before you can install it. This is pretty common for Microsoft’s downloads so I’m not going to complain too much about it.
Here’s the EULA
A reminder that you should only have one anti-virus software installed or else you will potentially have conflicts between the different AV products. In fact installing MSE will also disable Windows Defender (Vista’s built in Antispyware software).
Once you get though all the prompts the installation breezed through very quickly.
Installation is complete and you are prompted to download the latest Definitions and run a scan.
The interface is very clean and Changing the time and frequency for the weekly scans is very easy.
Not being willing to download an actual real virus to my computer just to get a screenshot, I downloaded the Eicar Test Virus and MSE immediately flagged it as possible malicious code.
It removed the test virus and everything turned back to a calming green.
