Whether you are an experienced Windows user or new to Microsoft’s all-powerful operating system, the chances are you may have either have to protect yourself from the threats of computer viruses or had to deal with the fallout when your system is infected. Research a virus related problem on an internet forum, the most common reply would be to arm yourself with a decent antivirus, that or buy yourself a Mac or install Linux.
There are a number of free antivirus solutions for Windows, some of the most popular distributions including; AVG, Avast, ClamWin, Avira Antivir. One company you might have expected to write their own antivirus software for Windows would be the creators of the operating system the viruses were designed to exploit; Microsoft. Sadly that was not the case…until now!
Today I am pleased to introduce and review Microsoft Security Essentials, a free real-time protection software designed to keep your system free from Viruses, Trojans, Spyware and Malware. We will take a look and see just how well it fares against other, more well-known virus scanners.
Installation
Obtaining your copy of Microsoft Security Essentials is very straightforward, providing you own a valid copy of Microsoft Windows. The Essentials team have catered for most Windows installations, up to and including Windows 7, the latter being due for release in the coming month.
To download the software, simply navigate to the Microsoft Security Essentials website located here. The download button is patently obvious, staring at you from the middle of the page so give that a click, selecting your country and your operating system version in the resulting pop-up box:
You should now have downloaded the application to your hard drive and begun the installation process. The first couple of steps will determine whether your copy of Windows is genuine before letting you install the suite onto your system.
Using Microsoft Security Essentials
When the software is first launched, it will attempt to connect to the update server and make sure your antivirus and program definitions are up-to date. It will also ask you to specify whether it should perform an initial “Quick Scan” of your system before letting you play with the program.
The design of Microsoft Security Essentials is very minimal, making it easy for people who are new to antivirus software to find their way around the different options and tabs.
The “Home” screen alerts the user as to the status of the scanner itself, by default the “Real Time Protection” should be set to “On”, giving you piece of mind that the software is sitting in the background, quietly processing and checking files as you work. Here you are also able to perform a scan of your computer, choosing from the options “Quick”, “Full” or “Custom”.
A “Quick” scan will perform a virus scan on the most commonly used destinations used to harbour infected files, both on your hard drive and registry. A Full scan will thoroughly scan your ENTIRE computer and will most likely take a good few hours but it is probably the best way to make sure you don’t have an infected file doing some damage somewhere in the corners of a random folder somewhere in your files.
A “Custom” scan is, you guessed it, a scan you can specify what folders are scanned. This is for the more advanced users who have multiple hard drives and complex systems.
Scanning Results
My computer runs pretty well and I employ general good computer practices when downloading files I don’t know so I was expecting my scan results to come back clean. I had previously scanned my computer with AVG Free and other than a few mentions of Tracking Cookie’s, it came back clean. To Microsoft’s credit my scan was clean except two possible exceptions, stemming from an installation of UltraVNC. Here I guessed the scanner identified these files could be used to create a backdoor in a Windows system but I use UltraVNC to administrate my home PC remotely so I added them to the sale list for future scans.
As you can see Microsoft Security Essentials has alerted me to possible threats but I have chosen to allow them on my computer. It’s also nice to be able to see why it was flagged and an explanation of where the file was found.
Conclusion
From what I have seen of Microsoft Security Essentials, the software is genuinely a very good piece of kit. The download file is small, the options and settings are easy to understand and even though I don’t have a particularly vulnerable system, the threats it did detect were valid.
The scanner seems to be less resource hungry than it’s more established counterparts, especially considering AVG Free weighs in at least 60MB. One downside I did notice was that it doesn’t support scanning of email and also instant messaging file transfers but these features will probably come in future updates.
I can see no reason why you wouldn’t be able to switch your antivirus over to Microsoft, they do have a pretty clear idea of what weaknesses are on their systems after all. Download the tool, give it a try and let us know what you think, from what we can see it’s pretty darn good.
