Being open source advocates, logging in our Windows session calls for summoning the “dark side” of ours, which I’ve been on lately because of my performance tests with Windows 7. I have managed to reformat my computer again because my Win7 won’t stop crashing and just when I installed my antivirus, alas! Another BSOD greets me.
Thinking there might be a problem since AVG free was a 32-bit program, I decided to try the antivirus solution offered by none other than Microsoft themselves. My copy of Windows was genuine, so I didn’t worry about the updates and such, and for sure they have optimized the antivirus to work with my software.
Downloading it was a hitch. The size was only some five megabytes and setup was a breeze. Immediately after installing itself, it updated itself and after about ten minutes, Microsoft Security Essentials was running its first antivirus test.
It was a bit weird though that while scanning it suddenly stopped to say that its real-time scanning was disabled. I just happened to go to Device Manager checking the status of my drivers and it halted it just like that. Anyway, I just enabled it again and it snapped back to its “green-your-computer-is-protected” mode.
The RAM count is barely five megs in the process monitor, but with its other components I’d say it would consume about 40 megs of memory, still pretty small just like my NOD 32 before. It does have room for advanced tweaks such as what to do when certain levels of vulnerabilities exist.
This looks like a good antivirus solution if you’re an advanced user, and you know what good is from bad, just want some first-level protection in your computer.
Lets see how it fares when I come installing them cracked software. AVG always shuts it down, but my NOD 32 knows what they are and they ignore it.