The Story

Today Microsoft released its free antivirus software for users of Windows whose installs of the operating system pass a validation test. That means it’s free to everyone with a genuine copy of Windows.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a small download that seems to provide a whole mess of features. Once you get the 5 megabyte file, the program will update the virus definitions and do a quick scan. And when Microsoft says quick, they mean quick. On a 320 gigabyte hard drive with a whole bunch of stuff on it, the scan took around fifteen minutes. Plus unlike Avast Antivirus, you can schedule scans.

Ars Technica did a fuller review of MSE, and they were fairly impressed. The most notable feature they mentioned was how MSE doesn’t just check definition files to find malware, but also monitors how programs are behaving:

MSE is the first Microsoft security product to make use of the company’s new Dynamic Signature Service (DSS); the next version of Forefront will also use DSS. When MSE detects that a file is making suspicious actions (such as unexpected network connections, attempting to …

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