It's hard to talk about a Microsoft product
dispassionately — most of us come into
contact with MS products daily, so it's
difficult not to have a knee-jerk reaction
one way or another. Nonetheless, viewed as
dispassionately as possible, Microsoft new
malware detector/remover, Security
Essentials, appears to be a product that does
what it claims, does it well, doesn't seem to
have any hidden agenda, and is [gasp] free.
Microsoft Security Essentials (hereafter MSE
— it's just too long a name to type
repeatedly)
is a stripped-down version of Windows
Live OneCare 2.0, which tried to do lots more
(firewall, network management, photo backup,
etc.) and, like many do-it-all programs,
never managed to do any of them well. Well,
actually, some people thought it did do some
things well but it was complex enough that
few people had the patience to try.
Instead, MSE is nothing more than a malware
detector and remover, where "malware" is
defined as viruses, spyware, and anything
else that tries to do nasty things to your
computer. And judging by the reviews, it
seems to do this very well.
One of our clients recently heard about MSE
and asked us what we thought. A little
research turned up only a single review
(Hiawatha Bray in the
Globe, who was enthusiastic). But in the last
week or so new reviews have been turning up,
some from gurus we have watched over the
years and learned to trust. All of the
reviews have been positive. In particular,
all noted that MSE put a significantly
lighter load on the system than some of the
"name-brand" programs like Norton and McAfee.
This is useful because many older systems are
beginning to struggle under the load of
increasingly resource-hungry software.
Anti-virus/spyware programs tend to be
especially resource-hungry because most scan
every file before allowing it to be opened.
This is a bigger concern than you might
think, since most large programs (Outlook,
Firefox, etc.) use hundreds, and in some
cases, thousands of files. Some of these
files are components of the program itself
and others are part of the operating system
or other utilities (like display or print
drivers). Scanning every file before opening
it can put a huge load on a system.
That MSE appears to be able to scan files
while using fewer system resources is a big
plus for it. So far, all the reviews we've
seen indicated it was as good at finding
viruses and spyware as its competition
despite (1) putting a lighter load on the
system and (2) being free.
Since we have not yet had a chance to try it
ourselves (we are planning to download it and
install it today), we are tentatively
recommending MSE. We'll report on our
experience with MSE in a later newsletter.
