Microsoft Security Essentials Beta Released

Microsoft officially released the Microsoft Security Essentials Beta yesterday that provides you with free protection from viruses and spyware, including Trojans, worms and other malicious software. MSE replaced the paid LiveOne Care services that Microsoft recently shutdown.

MSE has a very small footprint, uses small amounts of bandwidth for updates, and doesn't take up a lot of resources on your system. I've been running the beta for a while now and I have actually forgotten it was running on my system, I don't know if that's a good thing or not.

I've been running AVG along-side with MSE and I've also been testing different scenarios like downloading test viruses and other malicious things to see how MSE responds. In every case, MSE responded before AVG - locking access to the virus/software until I made an action to allow or remove. I've been very impressed with the result thus far, but I'm still not turning AVG off just yet.

MSE runs on Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. Once you have installed MSE, be sure to turn on the scan removable drives options, as it is not enabled by default.

The bottom line, I really like MSE but I wish it had some more advanced features that some of the other free AV software has. Do I think MSE will steal users away from other free AV products? Possibly so, especially since MSE is very easy on the resources and seems to do well at detection in my small tests. Will it move corporate and business customers away from paid products? Probably not. They want a guarantee backed behind a product, a gold level support, and so on.

Where To Download Microsoft Security Essentials Beta
Head over to Microsoft.com/Security_essentials