Microsoft Security Essentials
What’s In a Name Anyways?
Well, it doesn’t get any awards for having a catchy name, however Microsoft’s new anti-virus offering titled ‘Microsoft Security Essentials’ is a good product with a great price tag; free. I guess Microsoft Anti-Virus was too self-explanatory a name for the marketing gurus in Redmond. To be fair, however, MSE (my un-official abbreviation for Microsoft Security Essentials) is more than just anti-virus. It protects against spyware and other nasties too.
Liberation with a Capital L
MSE runs quietly, in the background, without pestering prompts, balloons, or any other annoyances. For that alone it deserves kudos. The reality is that you could open notepad and make the same claim. This leads to the most important question: Does MSE do a good job protecting your computer from viruses/spyware/etc.? The answer, so far, seems to be yes. The reviews I’ve read make the case that MSE is as good as other offerings from AVG, McAfee, Symantec, etc. The difference is that MSE is blissfully quiet! And did I mention free?
Bundles of Grief
My biggest complaint against most of the other anti-virus offerings (ahem… McAfee, Symantec) is that they want to bundle their anti-virus with “complete” internet security suites. Yuck! These bundles eat system resources, slow your computer to a crawl, and cause instability issues. When you install anti-virus it should NOT come with a firewall, intrusion prevention, active web-filtering, pre-emptive cognitive destination avoidance, and a hands-free parallel parking system. Just say NO to these bloat-ware suites!
My New Number One
I have been recommending AVG for years now but I am officially changing my recommendation to MSE. You heard it here first! I wouldn’t go out of my way to switch from AVG to MSE, but I would definitely uninstall McAfee or Symantec for MSE. Just my two cents.