Windows Defender is Dead, Long Live MS Security Essentials (Morro)

We’ve know about this for the last 9 months, but the day is finally here. After a failed attempted at a subscription anti-malware product called Onecare, Microsoft has released a free anti-malware suite called “Security Essentials”.

This is the product code named “Morro” that was talked about last November. It works in much the same way Windows Defender Worked in terms of Anti-Spyware, except now rather than just combating Spyware, it also now does Viruses (which should also includes Worms).

I have written about AVG, and the ill-fated move to 8.0 from 7.5.  Of course as I wrote back then, the best thing about AVG 7.5 was that it confined itself to being just an anti-virus program, rather the a suite of bloat that AVG 8.0 and up turned into being. This meant it worked well with Windows Defender without having to duplicate services.

The only down side right now is that Security Essentials seems to be a “limited” beta, meaning that only 75,000 people are going to be permitted to download the software package. I can confirm however that Security Essentials does install from it’s own exe file without any need to “validate” it aside from the normal “windows genuine advantage” stuff. Ergo once you have the installer, there seem to be nothing stopping you from installing it on all your systems. I’m guessing that even after the 75,000 downloads, Security Essentials will be around in lots of places. With so few restriction placed on the files, I’ve guessing the 75,000 limit is just pro-forma.

The downloads themselves come in three flavors, 32 XP, 32 Bit Vista/7, and 64 Bit Vista/7.

I’ve tested the software on a few systems in my lab today. My Windows 7 Box ran it just fine with little in the way of distraction, but it’s a fast box, so I did not expect it to have any problems. I also tried it in a system on which AVG was having some critical errors. Security Essentials installed and ran with out the odd problems be caused by AVG on that particular box. Finally, I tested Security Essentials on an older and slow p4 2 GHz with only 512 MB of ram. On this system, we would normally have installed ClamWin non-realtime anti-virus because the overhead of running XP with SP3 is in my opinion to great for just 512 MB. We tested this system first with AVG 8.5 running then with Security Essentials. There was a noticeable increase in boot speed with Security Essentials over AVG. The basic running of the system was also snappier with Security Essentials where with AVG it did seem to drag, especially when opening directory with lots of files.

Overall my first impression on Security Essentials is a good one. I’ll run it for another few days here in the lab, but if it pans out, it will start to go on systems as early as next week. We stall have a bunch of AVG 7.5 systems out there that need to be switched over.