Microsoft Security Essentials

Microsoft have been busy working on a replacement for there OneCare as in “All in One” AntiVirus + Spyware application which will be Free once it comes out.  A couple of days ago they allowed 75,000 copies into the wild for people to test it out, with versions for XP, Vista/Win7 32bit & 64Bit.

The question is – does it stop Spyware, Does it catch Virus and has it got a low memory / CPU front print and finally, can it detect things quickly or does it take forever to scan your machine.  I watched Scott from Compute Ability test it out via an infected machine – this machine having AntiVirus2009 which is a nasty piece of Malware that overtakes your machine:

The end result of that show as it failed to even spot it was infected. I tested this myself and my findings were as follows:

It took forever to Scan my machine – this remember was a fresh build of Windows with not much installed.  It found Zero (as expected) problems and then I scanned my external Drive which it managed to pick up 4 Virus / Malware in files I had stored (that Avast Seem to miss). The Scan took Many hours – I lost track after 3 hours to be honest. I tested it against a Home page changing code and it let it happen (failed) and finally I was wondering what was eating my CPU up – 50% was been used by the program – so defiantly a CPU hog.

I tried to remove it – it got to the end and said it had failed, half the files were mssing, the service was still running – what a sorry state of affairs. I had to re-install it, kill the service / process and then Uninstall the program – glad to see the back of it.

So Microsoft – you have failed in making a product that actually works, this is not better then the complete useless Windows Defender. The program is out there on Torrents if you want to test this for Microsoft but there is better (and Free) Program out there – such as SuperAntiSpyware for example.