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Microsoft Security Essentials..... Comments??

Lots of opinions -- pro and con, in these previous threads.

»Microsoft confirms Security Essentials to be released 9/29

»Are You Using Microsoft Security Essentials?

An older thread from MS Help -- talks about the program from beta into the final release.

»[Info] Microsoft Security Essentials BETA Released
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If things get any worse, I'll have to ask you to stop helping me.

reply to Jan Janowski
In addition to what MSeng posted, you may follow MSE aka Microsoft Security Essentials aka Morro Chatter >
Microsoft Security Essentials Forums

*Some* screenshots (as already posted) from early leaks:
Leaked: Microsoft Security Essentials (codename Morro)

reply to Jan Janowski
good - its free and u can uninstall it

bad - its like windows defender

In what way do you feel it is like Windows Defender, as the two do have several differences.

reply to Jan Janowski
It's nice that it's free and available to XP users.
The bad is that Microsoft gave the cold shoulder to those of us who use Windows XP 64.

reply to Jan Janowski
For the remaining weeks or so that I'll be probably using Windows, I have to say M$ Security Essentials was the best AV I've used lately, ESPECIALLY because it is an AV ONLY (with spyware) and it's light on the system.

Having used Windows Live Onecare in the past, and having slight issues with it over the time i had it, from backup not working right at times. I have to say Microsoft Security Essentials is the least intrusive antivirus out at the moment, working good on my Vista Desktop, and now 4 XP machines.

On the Second XP machine had the beta on there since it was released, and had to be one of the most stable Beta's i've ever used in recent memory. I did beta test Onecare when they released that, but had a boot sector on my test machine then, and unforuately missed alot of the testing time trying to fix that, when really i could've had it fixed sooner back then if i had known it was a boot sector virus causing all the issues.

So in conclusion i do plan on staying with Security Essentials

Even runs good on very old XP Desktop with these specs

Pentium 3 700
120mbs of ram
320gb hard drive
onboard video

(oldest Pc i have it on at the moment)

I just removed Security Essentials from a Dell 9300 Inspiron laptop running XP Pro, because it turned the machine into a pig after it was installed. What it did was to reactivate all of the background processes listed by msconfig — processes which had been laboriously disabled after checking them out one by one to make sure they weren't essential. S.E. apparently restored the INI and other configuration files, as well as silently resetting the hosts file. My wife was less than pleased with the resulting sluggishness of her favorite laptop.

Thanks to Drive Snapshot, I was able to revert to an image made just prior to the installation of Security Essentials, and that cleared the problems up. If you have installed many apps on your machine prior to installing S.E., beware of background processes showing up again. Also, if you are using the hosts file as a security tool, S.E. does rename the file to hosts.bak, so it's possible to get it back.

reply to Jan Janowski
It seems to work well on my XP Pro desktop as well as on other XP machines on which I've installed it.

A full scan resulted in a malware/net scanning tools library being decimated, and I had to restore them form backups. SANS top 20 as well as some *nix apps went into the bit bucket. AVG had never caught them.

So if you have some interesting tools on your system, be sure to either set MSE to quarantine, exclude the folders or at least have them backed up.
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The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. -- Justice Louis D. Brandeis

reply to upb

Can anyone tell me how many running processes MSE adds?

reply to upb
I second upb and uninstalled it for all the changes it made without my consent.

reply to upb

said by upb:

said by bangaroo:

This does not sound good. I am surprised no one else noticed all these changes, especially the hosts file. I'll be extra watchful if I every try SE.

It seems to be more complicated than I thought. The SE installer appears to use some kind of heuristic to examine the configuration files (hosts, win.ini, etc.) before it makes any changes to them. It appears that the installer is looking for modifications that may have been made by malware.

I have SE running on a desktop machine, and upon taking a closer look at that machine, it could be seen that SE left all of the configuration files unmolested. The processes which were disabled remained disabled. However, the XP Pro installation was a new one, and there weren't many apps on the machine. My wife's laptop, by way of comparison, has had many, many applications installed over its four year life.

Other people have reported that the hosts file can be modified (Steve Gipson of »grc.com reported it during a Security Now netcast a few weeks ago), so I'm not alone in some of these observations. It's too bad that the installer is silent about modifying the files when it decides to do so. The resulting surprises can be unpleasant.

If no joy in this thread, Indy Sabre post a query at:
Microsoft Security Essentials Forums

Edit to add:
See this extensive thread on the subject of MSE and Custom HOSTS Files.
»social.answers.microsoft.com/For···98a1f1da

reply to Indy Sabre

reply to Jan Janowski
From some of the comments, it appears there are some issues with MSE and windows 7 with 64 bit. I have not yet insalled 7. What problems might i encounter?
Thanks...........Butchie

I'm running Win7 Ultimate 64 bit with MSE and have had zero issues.

I run both MSE and NIS2010 in my household. MSE on my computer and NIS2010 on the other computers in the house.

reply to butchie