Free, Simple, Easy Anti-Virus

Free, Simple, Easy and Reliable aren’t normally words you hear in the same sentence as Anti-Virus, but there are some exceptions.  Today however that all changes with the release of the freshly-out-of-beta Microsoft Security Essentials, or MSE, which really does combine those words which have become my core requirements for an Anti-Virus product.  I’ve been using MSE for months, and it’s got my enthusiastic seal of approval!

We’ll forget the Free for a moment, although it is, but look at why MSE is a great consumer Anti-Virus product based on the other three key words, we’ll come back to Free.

Simple for me means that every interaction with MSE is understandable and it’s obvious how to do everything.  There are just 4 tabs to MSE:

• Home – shows at a glance what the current status is, Red = Bad, Amber = it’s a while since you scanned, and Green = good.  From this tab you can perform scans of the PC to check it’s ok.
• Update – Obviously lets you manually get updates to combat the latest viri and spy ware
• History – Tells you what’s been detected and when
• Settings – Allows you to change when scans are run, what happens when a virus is found, any particular file types or processes to exclude – if they keep giving false positives – and the like.

Easy should really be “easy going” I hate it when Anti-Virus gets in the way, with pop-ups telling me that updates are 2 seconds out of date or consuming all my computers resources whilst I’m trying to do that.  In my experience MSE doesn’t do that, instead in the Settings > Default Actions tab it’s possible to control what it does when malware is found.

Reliable means that it gets updates automatically with no fuss, which MSE does of course and that those updates are useful, well that’s a given as Microsoft’s Forefront product for businesses is built on the same technology.

Back to Free, MSE is free, and that’s important because I don’t want to spend money on something that I don’t (and shouldn’t need to) care about.  Anti-Virus adds no value to my computer use, it’s protection, perhaps if I did lots of dodgy stuff and went to lots of dodgy sites I’d feel different, but I like free a lot!

Foot notes:

Right now the website isn’t showing the final product, microsoft.com/security_essentials/ , but it will do later today.

Also worth mentioning is the free tool to help you get out of trouble if , Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool can help you get rid of spyware and you can findout how to use it on Page 276 of The Rough Guide to Windows 7.