Microsoft Security Essentials was released a little over three weeks ago, and as promised in this post I’m back with an update about my experiences with it. Upon its release I immediately installed Security Essentials on my desktop PC and began using it. A couple of days later I installed it on my notebook PC, and then a few days after that I installed it on Cheria’s computer. We have been using it on all of our computers ever since, and I must say that so far we’ve been extremely impressed.
Since I have contact email addresses listed on all the websites that I maintain, I receive tons and tons of junk emails, many of them containing malicious code. I do my very best to weed out the “bad” emails from the good, but every now and then I mistakenly open one that contains a virus. Microsoft Security Essentials has come to the rescue each time, alerting me about the nasty code and blocking it from being installed. I ran a couple of highly-trusted third-party online malware scanners after each incident, and the computer has always come up clean.
I’m also quite impressed with the small footprint of Security Essentials. Compared to the anti-malware suites from Norton and McAfee, the pool of resources it uses is very minimal. In fact, the Microsoft product is so efficient that I don’t even know it’s running unless I happen to look at the task bar!
After using it for over three weeks and on multiple systems (each connected to the Internet), I am very impressed with Microsoft Security Essentials. In my opinion, this is one of the best pieces of software Microsoft has ever distributed. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for a really effective anti-malware application that won’t make your PC run as slow as molasses or cost you a fortune.
Microsoft Security Essentials is absolutely free to download and use. Click here to download your own copy.