Gorilla Geeks Blog

Microsoft has officially released their newest security software package, Microsoft Security Essentials, and so far, I'm all smiles. MSE is free, fast and fully capable of protecting your PC from all of those nasty internet infections.

For being free, MSE allows for an unheard of amount of customization. Not only can you schedule scans, but you can decide what type of scan to perform (Quick or Full), you can also have MSE check for updates before performing the scan, or you can direct MSE to scan only if the computer is idle at the designated scan time. MSE can also be configured to automatically scan USB storage devices once they are attached, which is a great idea by the way, since USB drives are the portable medium of choice now days.

It's also fast, really, really fast. It took MSE less than 5 minutes to perform a Quick Scan on my 200GB drive. It gets better though; MSE uses CPU throttling and thread prioritization to keep your system responsive while scanning.

It's safe; MSE automatically creates a system restore point before performing any file operations. This allows the user to take the computer back to the state it was at prior to performing the scan with MSE.

As of this writing, Microsoft Security Essentials is available for Windows XP 32 bit, Windows Vista/7 32 and 64 bit. It's free, it's awesome, and it's worth a shot.