Microsoft Security Essentials.
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We use it at work and I have it running on my PC at home. The price is right, bang on the money, namely, free. I guess it won't rank up there in the top-drawer of AV products but it seems to do the job but how well some of you folks might know. Compared to paid for products, are you getting what pay for? The big-hitters in the AV marketplace would no doubt try and manipulate you with all sorts of horror stories that only a purchased product would protect you from, but is MSE a good product?
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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It hasn't let me down and I've used it for quite a few years now. I've had more trouble with MacAVirus. At work we use Sophos, but Its very expensive for a home user.
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We use Sophus as well and I find it to be a memory hog (around 200MB) - have you had any issues with it?
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We use Sophus as well and I find it to be a memory hog (around 200MB) - have you had any issues with it?
Not at all but we have changed the background scanning to be new or updated files only.
Every day, thousands of innocent plants are killed by vegetarians. Help end the violence EAT BACON
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Not an intentional hijack, you understand, but ... have you tried "System Configuration" startup differential? If not, back to the thread answer, both Norton AND McAffee SAAS can be easily disabled during ... ahem ... skyrim play.
Haven't had either Norton or McAffee on my system for so long that, the answer is no to your question. Prior to MSE becoming free, I used Avast for several years so we are talking about ~7/8 years since I've used a non-free product. It doesn't make sense to pay for something when there are free alternatives. I also don't want to support companies who get their software bundled on new machines, especially when their uninstallers don't properly uninstall the product and you need a removal tool to get rid of them completely. This is beyond most average users I would guess, so they'd end up stumping up cash for AV protection when the trial period ended, simply because sorting this out is beyond them.
“Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities - that's training or instruction - but is rather making visible what is hidden as a seed”
“One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated”Sir Thomas More (1478 – 1535)
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We use it at work and I have it running on my PC at home. The price is right, bang on the money, namely, free. I guess it won't rank up there in the top-drawer of AV products but it seems to do the job but how well some of you folks might know. Compared to paid for products, are you getting what pay for? The big-hitters in the AV marketplace would no doubt try and manipulate you with all sorts of horror stories that only a purchased product would protect you from, but is MSE a good product?
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
Its fine as far as it goes, but has some limitations. For example, I believe (I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong) it only really works well at scanning web downloads etc if you download from IE - using Chrome or FF may mean you need to consider other tools as well.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." Alan Kay.
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Its fine as far as it goes, but has some limitations. For example, I believe (I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong) it only really works well at scanning web downloads etc if you download from IE - using Chrome or FF may mean you need to consider other tools as well.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." Alan Kay.
Rob Grainger wrote:
it only really works well at scanning web downloads etc if you download from IE
It's half wrong. What Microsoft refers to as their "Security Suite" includes Smartfilter in IE to prevent downloading from websites that are on their blacklist, but MSE will still scan files downloaded from other browsers as the file hits the HDD. So the scan occures a little later. IE would prevent the download, with other browsers it finds the infection after the download. I'm almost always in Firefox and I sometimes see an MSE message telling me it's cleaning something right at the moment I hit a download link on some sites. And now MSE is built-in Windows 8 Under the name Windows Defender, but if you prefer using another anti-virus, Defender will deactive itself when another recognized anti-virus software is installed.
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We use it at work and I have it running on my PC at home. The price is right, bang on the money, namely, free. I guess it won't rank up there in the top-drawer of AV products but it seems to do the job but how well some of you folks might know. Compared to paid for products, are you getting what pay for? The big-hitters in the AV marketplace would no doubt try and manipulate you with all sorts of horror stories that only a purchased product would protect you from, but is MSE a good product?
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
I use Comodo personally, have had no issues yet :)
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We use it at work and I have it running on my PC at home. The price is right, bang on the money, namely, free. I guess it won't rank up there in the top-drawer of AV products but it seems to do the job but how well some of you folks might know. Compared to paid for products, are you getting what pay for? The big-hitters in the AV marketplace would no doubt try and manipulate you with all sorts of horror stories that only a purchased product would protect you from, but is MSE a good product?
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
I've been using MSE for a few years now and I believe it works well. I, too, do NOT like to pay for things, so the freebies is always the route that I will take. I'll admit, even though I'm a developer, I'm a "beginner" when it comes to AV protection etc. So here's my question for you all. I've been running MSE for a few years, while also running Avast. It "appears" as though they are both running, but are they? Are they basically doing the exact same thing? What are people's preferences between the 2 products. What are the necessary [free] products to keep a computer running clean? I use MSE, Avast, SpyBot, used to run Sygate Personal Firewall, but not anymore. Malware Bytes, what are the other products that are also "essential" to have running on a machine?
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We use it at work and I have it running on my PC at home. The price is right, bang on the money, namely, free. I guess it won't rank up there in the top-drawer of AV products but it seems to do the job but how well some of you folks might know. Compared to paid for products, are you getting what pay for? The big-hitters in the AV marketplace would no doubt try and manipulate you with all sorts of horror stories that only a purchased product would protect you from, but is MSE a good product?
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
I can say there is only one thing that I find disturbing about Microsoft Security Essentials. I had been using the product in it's paid form "One Care" for a year or so. This was about 3 years ago. I had it continually keep telling me I needed to take security checks to determine if my install of Windows was authentic - it was, I do not steal. I don't know about you guys, but how many times have you had to do that in the past? This used to pop up a lot on the MS developers site. I use Windows 7 64-bit. I guess there was a bug with "one" of the versions of the authentication checking module - that was XP based somewhere on the Microsoft site. Well I found it and it told me my version of Windows 7 was not authentic and then upon a reboot my partition was bricked. Calls to paid support lead nowhere in this case as it was an isolated problem - that was not supposed to happen as they said. They put me through the ringer to make sure I was not a software thief. I had all my receipts and bought my upgrade on the MS store. After that embarrassing few minutes, there was no solution. I lost some data and a 1TB Drive as well. When you start to mix other business interests with things that other AV software developers have no reason interest or need to delve in, that are not related to AV or Malware - things happen. All to often, although it IS better than it used to be - I hate getting the you have to re-install speech on a paid support call. I know the issue most likely does not exist anymore as this product has matured. The problem of Mixing things with the OS is no stranger to Windows. I use Norton :)
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We use it at work and I have it running on my PC at home. The price is right, bang on the money, namely, free. I guess it won't rank up there in the top-drawer of AV products but it seems to do the job but how well some of you folks might know. Compared to paid for products, are you getting what pay for? The big-hitters in the AV marketplace would no doubt try and manipulate you with all sorts of horror stories that only a purchased product would protect you from, but is MSE a good product?
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
Been using it for years, no problems here. Most times it doesn't consume too much CPU but occasionally it can get a little crazy, maybe doing background updates. I've only heard and read good things about it when people have intentionally put it through its paces and I have not heard of one virus that can specifically attack and disable MSE, which is more than I can say for Norton or McAfee.
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We use it at work and I have it running on my PC at home. The price is right, bang on the money, namely, free. I guess it won't rank up there in the top-drawer of AV products but it seems to do the job but how well some of you folks might know. Compared to paid for products, are you getting what pay for? The big-hitters in the AV marketplace would no doubt try and manipulate you with all sorts of horror stories that only a purchased product would protect you from, but is MSE a good product?
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
I use MSE on both my computers. Last I checked on the site I like to look at AV products (http://www.av-comparatives.org/[^]) it was getting 93% of known viruses. Combine* it with Malwarebyte's Antimalware Pro (the liceinse is good as long as you have the key and uninstall from the previous computer, but it is worth a new copy for each computer if you plan to use it for 3+ years) which has a high rate of getting malware that is not in its database. Also a good firewall and maybe something to limit the damage things can do if they get on your system (particularly preventing them from terminating your other security software) will then have you in good stead. Check http://www.matousec.com/projects/proactive-security-challenge-64/results.php[^] for a quick look at products that do well at stopping the stuff your scanners miss. Also if you really feel insecure with free stuff, consider looking into security setting to turn on that are part of Windows such as Data Execution Prevention. * Be sure to look up information on configuring them to coexist, which when I installed them meant excluding each from the other's scans.
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We use it at work and I have it running on my PC at home. The price is right, bang on the money, namely, free. I guess it won't rank up there in the top-drawer of AV products but it seems to do the job but how well some of you folks might know. Compared to paid for products, are you getting what pay for? The big-hitters in the AV marketplace would no doubt try and manipulate you with all sorts of horror stories that only a purchased product would protect you from, but is MSE a good product?
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
Don't know how well Security Essentials can protect a user that insists on downloading files from dubious sources, but then again can any of the AV products protect from that? I know SE works much better as far as memory usage, system resources and annoying pop up messages than any paid software I have ever used. To me Symantec and Mcafee have become almost as bad as a virus themselves, I would never use any of their products again.
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We use it at work and I have it running on my PC at home. The price is right, bang on the money, namely, free. I guess it won't rank up there in the top-drawer of AV products but it seems to do the job but how well some of you folks might know. Compared to paid for products, are you getting what pay for? The big-hitters in the AV marketplace would no doubt try and manipulate you with all sorts of horror stories that only a purchased product would protect you from, but is MSE a good product?
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
I prefer to use a bit of common sense, it definitely cheaper... ;P I use Security Essentials only when testing prerelease Windows versions, mostly because no antivirus program work properly in prerelease versions, but I find it ok and relatively easy to configure, otherwise, I usually use Avast, AVG or Avira all of them free stuff.
CEO at: - Rafaga Systems - Para Facturas - Modern Components for the moment...
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We use it at work and I have it running on my PC at home. The price is right, bang on the money, namely, free. I guess it won't rank up there in the top-drawer of AV products but it seems to do the job but how well some of you folks might know. Compared to paid for products, are you getting what pay for? The big-hitters in the AV marketplace would no doubt try and manipulate you with all sorts of horror stories that only a purchased product would protect you from, but is MSE a good product?
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
I tested a lot of free products AND a lot of paid products... For my work I had to install different antimalware products paid or not on different versions of Windows for my clients. These products are all useless IF the user have bad habits. It is not the antimalware product that make the difference : it is the users. There are users that click on everything and browse everywhere on the Net... this is where you have to work and an antimalware do not make the difference. There are users that never get any malware BUT they have antimalware software that slow down there machine.... it's a pitty ! Educate the users ! That is the key !
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We use it at work and I have it running on my PC at home. The price is right, bang on the money, namely, free. I guess it won't rank up there in the top-drawer of AV products but it seems to do the job but how well some of you folks might know. Compared to paid for products, are you getting what pay for? The big-hitters in the AV marketplace would no doubt try and manipulate you with all sorts of horror stories that only a purchased product would protect you from, but is MSE a good product?
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
I have had great results with MSE. I do a manual update lookup several times a day (only takes a few seconds), run a full scan EVERY day and I wait anxiously for the second Tuesday of every months big update that includes the freshest version of the anti-malware goodies. I find it lightweight, unobtrusive, and it never wants to sell me the next version.
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It actually stands up better than you might think. I'm very impressed with it. Unfortunately the license isn't nearly as agreeable for corporate use or I'd try to push it.
They have recently changed the terms of service to allow it to be used for small businesses with less than 10 computers, which is a rather welcome change. If you are any larger then that you will probably be going with a centrally managed paid solution anyway me thinks.
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MSE is only free in a business environment for up to 10 users. Anything more than that and you are violating the EULA. So while it may be "free", it's only up to a certain point.
"The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?" -- Oracle CEO Larry Ellison
I think most organizations with more than 10 machines will likely be going for a centrally managed solution anyway, so I don't know that it's a big problem either way. It's nice that they changed the EULA to allow businesses to run it at all, I remember that wasn't the case a year or two ago.
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Don't know how well Security Essentials can protect a user that insists on downloading files from dubious sources, but then again can any of the AV products protect from that? I know SE works much better as far as memory usage, system resources and annoying pop up messages than any paid software I have ever used. To me Symantec and Mcafee have become almost as bad as a virus themselves, I would never use any of their products again.
wakerunner wrote:
Symantec and Mcafee have become almost as bad as a virus themselves
McAfee seems to be oriented to murder any PC it's installed on. Not for the first time has McAfee been accused of murder.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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I have had great results with MSE. I do a manual update lookup several times a day (only takes a few seconds), run a full scan EVERY day and I wait anxiously for the second Tuesday of every months big update that includes the freshest version of the anti-malware goodies. I find it lightweight, unobtrusive, and it never wants to sell me the next version.
ErrolErrol wrote:
do a manual update lookup several times
Is there anyway to automate something like that? I usually only update every second blue moon and then only if I remember.
ErrolErrol wrote:
un a full scan EVERY day and I wait anxiously
I do that once in a while; every third blue moon. Maybe I'm too lax in my approach.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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We use it at work and I have it running on my PC at home. The price is right, bang on the money, namely, free. I guess it won't rank up there in the top-drawer of AV products but it seems to do the job but how well some of you folks might know. Compared to paid for products, are you getting what pay for? The big-hitters in the AV marketplace would no doubt try and manipulate you with all sorts of horror stories that only a purchased product would protect you from, but is MSE a good product?
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
I've been using it for years myself and always put it on friend's systems. So far no reports of any problems: I sure haven't had any.