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Finally Microsoft has released its long awaited free version of Antivirus which supersedes Windows Live OneCare after three months of extensive beta testing. The new tool has been renamed as “Microsoft Security Essentials” or MSE and serves the purpose of real time consumer antimalware which can fight against viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans.

MSE is available for Windows XP 32-bit, Windows Vista 32/64 bit and also for Windows 7 32-64 bit and on its base is Microsoft Windows defender.

The User Interface:

Microsoft has used quite simple User interface for this program, which makes it for average users very easy to manage and use this antivirus software. MSE is designed to run in background and only prompts user when extremely important such as threat attention, requiring user action.  User reports and dialogs are simple and yet informative enough for user to take necessary steps. Updating of virus definitions also takes place in background and user even does not knows until they visit the software user interface.

Virus and Malware Detection

As far as virus and malware detection is concerned so far the results are impressive although not 100%. It is catching most of the malware which in some cases is not even caught with other 3rd party antivirus software such as AVG Free, etc.  It still has to go through rigorous testing by independent security firms become releasing the real strength, but for an average users it stacks up nicely among the top antivirus vendors.

It found a whooping list of virus on my USB key which i gave to a friend and got rid of them.

Performance

One of the most important problems users face with antivirus software are related speed and performance after installing the antivirus on their machines, well as far as MSE is concerned, it is even more lighter than Live OneCare. This is a refreshing and highly needed thing as far as demanding computing is concerned. I have not seen any unwanted delays and spiking processor usage on my windows 7 so far and have not noticed any performance decrease of my laptop. My laptop on windows 7 is exceptionally fast given I have software running like Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Visual studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 management studio, tons of IE8 windows at a given time with Skype and Nokia suite running in background with Microsoft one note. Finally after getting burned by Symantec enterprise security suite and all other antivirus packages this seems to be a decent antivirus, I just hope Microsoft keeps on delivering on this front and this product remain updated and FREE.

Finally I strongly recommend this to all windows users who want their machine to be fast yet well protected, its FREE and there are no licenses and registration required and it remains up-to-date automatically. and I am very happy with the user interface of Microsoft security essentials as most of the tasks are available at single click.

Give it a try by downloading from Microsoft Security Essentials site

Read other reviews of MSE  by tech sites like Ars Technica , Engadget and Mashable,

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