Microsoft Security Essentials

image The news is all abuzz about Microsoft releasing free Antivirus software recently.  Indeed they have – Microsoft Security Essentials is available free of charge.  So like any good techo, I need to take a look at this.  I’m evaluating this from the perspective of finding out if it could replace Trend Micro WFBS on our client sites. I uninstalled Trend Micro WFBS 6.0 from my Windows 7 laptop, rebooted and installed the new Microsoft Security Essentials product.  Install was pretty straight forward – I reckon my grandmother could do it. 

Naturally I skipped over the EULA like most techos and that is not good.  You see according to the EULA, MSE is free for home use and home based business use.  It is NOT free for business not based at home.  What this means is that the majority of my clients are not permitted to use this on their work computers.  Strike One for MS.

Ok – so now it’s installed my laptop, I take a look at the application itself. It looks very simple indeed.  I start to dig under the covers and find it’s already setup a scheduled scan for me. Great.  Looking through the console I can see this is a pretty simple product. Obviously designed for the end user in mind, and not the techo.

In all our client sites, we really love the centralised management console that we have to control the systems configuration and reporting.  This to me is mandatory for any product that I’ll use in the SMB space and NOT having it means that this product is worth less to me. No central management console – Strike Two.

No after using it for a few days (I started writing this a little bit back now), I’ve found some very “interesting” features.  One of them is that the laptop fails to go into suspend mode. It just freezes and locks up. Hmm – did not have a problem with this with Trend. Strike Three and you’re out.

So in brief… this is a product designed for home use, NOT for small business use at all.  If you want free AV supported by a name we all know, then this is certainly something to look at.

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Microsoft Security Essentials”

  1. Shasta Richman Says:

    December 30th, 2009 at 2:18 am

    I’ve owned an HP 2133 MiniNote and an ASUS 1000HE but the Acer 1410 seems to be the perfect Netbook solution. The size of the unit is not much larger than a 10.2″ Netbook but the high resolution 11.6″ screen makes this a joy to use for 50 eyes. The performance of the Core 2 Solo Processor is far superior to the Atom with only a slight decrease in battery life. The battery life would be even better (8 hours rather than 6 hours) if the 5600 amp battery was made available here in North America like it is in Europe. The 1410 is thinner than either of my other Netbooks and weights about the same.

    Other pluses over the standard Atom Netbooks is that the 1410 accepts up to 4 GB of RAM and as the Core 2 Solo is a 64 bit processor, you can run a 64 bit operating system on it. The keyboard is full size.

    On my other Netbooks I always felt I was giving up something, whether it was performance, screen resolution or a screen that could be used without eye strain. On the 1410 there is no compromises, performance is great and it is a pleasure to work on even for a full day. The 1410 is marketed as a Notebook rather than a Netbook because of the processor and operating system it ships with but in reality it is a Netbook on steroids. The 1410 meets every one of my requirements without compromises and I’ve therefore rated it 5 stars.

    Because retailers seem to list this in their Notebook rather than their Netbook category, the 1410 may be the best kept Netbook secret out there. The 1410 is truly what the Netbook experience should really be, a small portable computing solution without compromises.

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