Finally, someone gets it. Antivirus should be small, simple and not try to be all things to all people. It’s when this software gets bloated that it becomes a hindrance. I’ve installed Microsoft Security Essentials (test version) on my Windows 7 RC laptop. It’s small and light; I barely know it’s there. It’s aimed at the home market but the SOHO’s are just as likely to use it. It’s very simple and small, accomplishing what Forefront Client Security tried to do … until it bundled/required MOM 2005 so the management server became huge.
Combined with Windows Firewall (firewall, obviously) and Windows Defender (spyware) you have a nice free solution for Internet security without having to buy dodgy yellow-pack software (you know who I mean) on a subscription basis.
The beta is currently restricted to United States, Israel (English only), People’s Republic of China (Simplified Chinese only) and Brazil (Brazilian Portuguese only). 19 markets are to be added to the beta in the coming months. There is a leaked copy out there but I’m not recommending anyone use it.
A nice simple summary that anyone can understand. You get the usual context menus in Explorer so you can also kick off a manual scan.
I can quickly trigger manual updates. Automatic updates will be via Windows Updates, i.e. silent. I’ve read that updates could be as often as 3 times a day. Updates to the program will also be via Windows Update; maybe once a month.
Here I can see things that have been detected.
Here’s an alert I got when I downloaded Eicar, the test virus.
And here’s the result of a clean task.
My history was updated. This is what it deleted: file:C:UsersAFinnAppDataLocalMicrosoftWindowsTemporary Internet FilesLowContent.IE51E60T29Beicar[1].com. The file I was downloading never made it to the desktop where I was saving it to.
My laptop will do a scan in the morning while I’m having breakfast 🙂
These are the actions when a threat is found.
Real-time protection is set up nicely by default.
You can exclude specific paths from the scan.
I’ve added VM disk file extensions from the scan to improve their performance.
You can exclude certain processes, e.g. if you were running an MSDE.
Here’s the advanced settings. I’ve added the option to scan removable drives: I use USB drives quite a bit for photo storage and project work. I’ve seen some people commenting that an infeaction clean is slow. Yes, because it is preceded by a snapshot. This gives us a rollback in case of a false positive. For example, remember when a certain yellow-pack AV started removing Excel spreadsheets late one Friday night a few years ago? Imagine if it had taken a snapshot first … people wouldn’t have lost files. They could have restored them quite simply.
Finally this is how you feed back security information for MS to analyse.
All in all, this is a very simple product. Notice that there aren’t dozens of menu items with settings hidden all over the place? Notice it doesn’t try to be my Net Nanny? Notice that some 3rd party firewall hasn’t broken my home network? Sweet.