Microsoft Security Essentials download is over

I guess Microsoft was pretty serious when it said there was a 75,000 download limit for its new beta product, Microsoft Security Essentials. For anyone who really wanted to give it a go is going to need to wait or get it another way, if you know what I mean.

I myself have been using MSE for a day or so, ran a quick scan and a full scan. Thankfully, nothing was found (I hope). For those of you who are wondering, it is basically Windows Defender for viruses with a real-time protection addition.

Also luckily I haven't had to deal with the real-time protection and I would like to avoid using it for as long as a possibly can. Anyways, seeing as this is a process constantly running in the background, you are probably wanting to know "How much memory does it use?". I can answer that for you too! And surprisingly, it isn't much. As you can see in the screenshot below it only uses a little less than 4MB, which is really good for real-time protection. You know, seeing as ones like McAfee take somewhere around 100MB.



Here is a full screenshot of the main page of the MSE program, which as I have mentioned, has a resemblance of Windows Defender.



As you can see, you can set a time for a scheduled scan, but the options are somewhat sad. You can only choose from: Daily, Sunday, Monday, ..., Friday, or Saturday. You would think they would have better options to choose from, or if you could be more specific and choose every other day or something of that sort, but you can't. Of course you can choose the time it runs (It would have been dumb for them not too...) but it also includes a very interesting and good option of having MSE check for new updates and definitions before it runs a check. It never made sense to me to waste about an hour or so of my computers time and not have all the proper updates and definitions.



I would recommend everyone get MSE and try it for themselves. I myself have uninstalled my previous antivirus program (Avast!) and currently trusting my whole computers security to Microsoft's Security Essentials. I will see how that goes and report back, but I won't have much to report since I am pretty careful about where it is I go and download from the internet.

If you are wondering when Microsoft Security Essentials will be officially released, I cannot say for sure, but I remember hearing rumors that it would be before the end of 2009, and possibly in the fall, but one cannot be to sure.

Another thing, sadly MSE won't make it into Windows 7. Seeing as Windows 7 is just about to be shipped out to manufacturers and MSE won't be done by then, it obviously cannot be included. Hopefully it will be included as an update later on or in a Service Pack, but we will see.