Microsoft Security Essentials Public BetaLast year, Microsoft announced that it was halting development of its highly regarded Windows Live OneCare product (see my review of Windows Live OneCare 2.0) and would instead release a free anti-malware solution codenamed Morro by the end of 2009. Since then, things have been pretty quiet on the Morro front, and with the OneCare retirement date of June 30, 2009 fast approaching, I've gotten a lot of email from concerned users. What was going on with Morro?
Trouble is, I couldn't say much. I've actually been using pre-release Morro code for over a month, and a few weeks back, Microsoft briefed me about its plans and asked if I would keep it quiet until they were ready to go public. I would have been better off not agreeing, in this case: News of the Morro beta quickly leaked online and, in recent days, more and more details have emerged, while I had to remain silent. Finally, Microsoft relented, and agreed it was time to go public, about a week earlier than originally planned.
So here we are. Morro, of course, will be called Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) when it ships later this year around the same time as the Windows 7 general availability (GA) milestone. It will be absolutely free and made available to all genuine Windows XP, Vista, and 7 users, and will come in both 32-bit and 64-bit variants (32-bit only on XP).
A lot of what you may have read about MSE online, however, is untrue. It is most definitely not a "cloud computing" AV solution, whatever the heck that was supposed to mean, though one aspect of MSE's internal updating mechanism offers nearly real time protection. Put simply, MSE is OneCare minus the stuff that's not related to fighting malware. It doesn't have a managed firewall, can't manage a "circle" of computers on a home network, doesn't help prevent applications from putting icons in the system tray at boot-up, and doesn't have any online photo backup capabilities. What it does have, however, is all good stuff: MSE is small, fast, light, and effective, and since it's built on the same award-winning underpinnings as Microsoft's other security products you know you can trust it.
Let's take a closer look and blow past the surface overviews you may have seen elsewhere. There's a lot going on here.
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