Now available: Microsoft Security Essentials

Finally. No more need for rubbish anti-virus suites or half-baked freeware apps.

The best security for Malware ever!!! Congrats Miocrosoft!!

I miss some of the features of OneCare, like the programs startup manager (also available in Windows Defender), but aside from that, I'm very happy with MSE, and will recommend it to family and friends. I'm not sure if v1.0 was pushed out to beta testers yesterday but when I went to Microsoft Update, I got a def update and when I launch the program, the beta tag was gone.

What a great piece of software. Works like a charm.

logjamming The people you have that wierd religious relationship with at Apple include an anti-malware product in Mac OS X 10.6.x, I assume your comment applies to them as well?

Logjamming, are you saying that Apple shouldn't release security updates for the holes in their operating system? Because if they did they would be fixing problems in the OS that shoul not have been there in the first place and also laughable.

Waethorn "BTW: Mike, how flexible is the MSMPENG? Seems like they can build a UI for it fairly quickly." It's a pretty flexible and powerful system but I'm probably a bad choice to ask about it since I'm under NDA on things like internals of the various malware protection components.

Most excellent. Can you run this *with* AVG, or will the two conflict?

"Can you run this *with* AVG, or will the two conflict?" They'll conflict. You can't run two proactively-monitoring antimalware softwares side-by-side. It's bad mojo anyway - AVG faired very bad on the last proactive scan comparative test. It's a piece of crap, and quite frankly, anybody still using it now "because it's free" needs to have their head examined what with Microsoft offering a superior product. Even Avast has always rated higher than AVG.

@MacLawyer In my opinion, I wouldn't recommend it. One antivirus should be enough. Just pick the one you like the best and stick with that.

"I've also never heard of one person being hassled by any company for using a free AV in their small business." There are regulated companies that would get in serious trouble when they get a software audit. There's also the BSA, which manages illegal business software use cases (in Canada, it's called CAAST). Some may get away with it, but it's not a valid license, hence illegal for them to use it in those circumstances. I suppose you could say the same about purchasing Snow Leopard for $29 if you only use Tiger on your Mac. You could say, "ya people will do this anyway" but if Microsoft were able to instate some kind of enforcement on this, you'd still be crying the blues. When did it become ethically viable to "be" illegal?

@techfan: Cool, thanks. Good advice for all. BTW: Boots is awesome on the forums.

@Weathorn: "Boots is awesome on the forums." Yep! Dude's been there since the OneCare forums days.

@techfan: As the forum guy said, you'll likely just have to wait for the Microsoft Update servers to be propogated with the upgrade. In either case, you'll still have the updated engine and virus definitions, which is the main thing.

@wae before the 1.5 beta update I saw that 100% CPU issue with this product on XP, Vista and 7. I would get 80-100% CPU for about 30min after a reboot. I had a friend with a Vista machine SP1 with 1gig of RAM. He added 4gigs of RAM and I updated the box. His Crapafee was out of date so I gave him the beta, but then removed it after I saw this CPU problem and went with AVG.

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/msestart/thread/ff286d7... Know issue I guess, probably fixed now.

@NNAL: Spybot S&D can and will conflict with MSE if you have TeaTimer running. Spybot is a horribly out-of-date piece of software though. They don't keep it up-to-date enough to keep up with modern malware. It might've been good maybe 5 years ago, but its time has come and gone. " I would get 80-100% CPU for about 30min after a reboot." The problem that I'm mentioning was perpetual, until you removed whatever MSMPENG program caused it. Uninstalling and reinstalling USUALLY solved it, but there were rare instances where it didn't. I'm guessing it was from an engine update, or some kind of corruption caused by a particular set of virus definitions. There were rare instances where people had OneCare installed where a daily update caused the service to turn off too. Mind you, the number of problems that occured from updates to various MSMPENG host applications were far fewer than updates that I've seen for Norton and McAfee. If you have problems with any MSMPENG host app, try uninstalling it, deleting the folder for it in Program Files, and reinstalling it. That should solve that problem as it did for me. "Very small businesses with under 25 users aren't going to spend the money for a server to run their antivirus protection." Yes and no. See next response. "Most of my smaller clients are running Kaspersky Anti-virus which is the most cost effective solution I've been able to find for them." The SBSC always seemed to prefer Trend Micro, which was the first company with a proper SBS-compatible solution for antimalware. It included a web-based management console, as well as deployment tools. It was good in theory, but the execution was lousy. I like FCS's approach, but the system requirements are too high IMHO. They need to think smaller when it comes to database requirements - fitting within the SBS maximum of 75 PC's would be a good start, running on the free SQL Express would be the next thing to look at. "I have some small clients who would be served perfectly with a more business oriented version of Home Server to handle their file storage and back up needs but there is just nothing out there." Home Server is supported for small businesses. It even works in an SBS domain if you need full PC backup with your SBS setup. " SBS is overkill for them as is any version of MS Server." It really depends on the business. SBS is a fine solution for many small businesses because it offers features that businesses are looking for, and also includes scalability for the future. Entirely cloud based solutions don't offer the same level of control, and often cost more than SBS + managed services to maintain the network. You don't get the benefit of a managed network environment either. Users shouldn't be in control of the IT environment - the IT department should be.

"Spybot S&D can and will conflict with MSE if you have TeaTimer running. Spybot is a horribly out-of-date piece of software though." Actually, MSE hasn't gone ballistic due to TeaTimer. It has practically ignored it, actually.

@Waethorn: True. I would manually update MSE if it wasn't using the latest defenitions, but since it is, I'll wait for the upgrade to be posted on MS Update. I want it now though ;-D

"I'll wait for the upgrade to be posted on MS Update. I want it now though ;-D" If the engine and defs are the same, what does the RTW really give you? Let's just give you an example of this: There's a lot of talk about people trying to install Exchange SP2 on SBS 2008 to keep it right up-to-date, but Microsoft hasn't made an SBS-friendly installer for Exchange SP2 yet, and the regular one breaks A LOT of stuff in SBS and requires LOTS of manual fixes and workarounds. So why not just wait for it and everything will be good in the end.

@Waethorn I iopened the MSE console then clicked help upgrade MSE and it did it all automatically. Under about it now shows Microsoft Security Essentials Version: 1.0.1611.0

@Waethorn: True, again. I guess it's just one of those things about having the latest software, even though, technically, the latest software is already install.

Great news, I've been running the beta and have a high opinion of it. I hope the EU bureaucrats don't get their panties in a bunch over this one.