Mse

Any opinions here as to Microsoft Security Essentials, esp. as compared to Avast, AVG, and Antivir?

Effectiveness of prevention? Impact on performance?

I just installed it on a new build, but don't have any real use time yet.

 

MSE for me on XP:

Updates once daily only
Scan too long (1 hr)
Too few features
Slowing my system down
Putting what looked like Restore Points in System Restore? Therefore only 1 system restore point shown in one week.

Tried it for 1 week and removed it.

Perhaps not for my machine and definitely not to my liking.

 

I tried it out for 2 months (short time) but in that time it slowed the computer down and the scans were pretty long for me as well. I am running a windows xp. I also removed it

 

While MSSE is worlds better than their Defender, I personally would not rely on it as a front line or as primary protection. It seems to "play well with others" and I haven't noticed any problems when it's used alongside Avast, Avira, etc. It also seems to be pretty low-key, it's unobtrusive and fairly light on resources.

 

On my Win 7 64-bit system a quick scan (80,000 items) takes less than four minutes, and it isn't an especially fast machine either. So very wide spread of results here :confused

 

Thanks for all the replies. Seems good for Vista or better.

@dlb, you mean this can be run along side another antivirus program? But MSE is an antivirus, right?

 

Yup. I have personally run it with Avira and AVG w/o problems. MSE is considered more of an anti-malware (IMO) since it targets all sorts of stuff, but there should be no problems running it with other security programs.

 

i liked mse cuz of it's "small footprint", didn't take up a lot of room or resources, perfect for xp. but now that i've moved on to windows 7, mse just upgraded to version 1963 & it will not update virus definitions on 1st attempt, always takes second try. says connection failed. from what i've read on m$ forums, it's a known issue with the latest build, but that users shouldn't be doing manual updates anyway. funny thing about that is that windows updates identified 1 update available & it's for mse, so tried that route; same thing. update failed but works 2nd try. don't have that prob on the xp machine. until they fix that, i've moved on to avira. don't care for the splash screen when it updates but i'll get over it. at least i know it's updated!!! :-D

 

Found this gem of a link. http://www.raymond.cc/antivirus/scantime2.html

TONS of info about AV Benchmarks by Raymond! Select a Benchmark Report at the top of the page. Look at the scanning times of MSE, memory etc and compare it with other AV's.