Alpha Technical Solutions

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Out for about a week now is Microsoft’s latest foray into anti-virus software. This time around the software is a free download designed for the consumer end of the market (with Forefront Security staying in place as a provider of Enterprise level protection).  So that’s the first thing you need to remember – this is a product designed for consumers. It’s big competitors being the ever present Norton, or the much beloved provider of free antivirus software – AVG.

I wanted to be sure about who could use this so I checked out the licence agreement. Security Essentials is licensed for use in your home or for a home based business. So this is not for you if you run a large office,  but if you are a home based business –as many freelancers are then you can use this. That’s a good distinction that Microsoft has made. Many free offerings are only free for home use, which makes it a little confusing for anyone who works for themselves from home. Security Essentials immediately gets over this by allowing in all home based businesses. In this economy that’s a lot of people; so by making this product freelance friendly Microsoft are looking to score a lot of friends.

As for the real important practical stuff – well it looks and reads like a lot of other products. It handles viruses, spyware and other assorted malware via a real-time protection system. So nothing new here. It has an interface that won’t challenge anyone used to using antivirus software. So its a case of so far, so good. It also installs easy enough – particularly if you download from Internet Explorer – in fact the download is IE friendly so if you do decide to install Security Essentials its a good idea to do it via Internet Explorer.

So what do we think. Well it looks like a plausible piece of software, but I’d like to use it a little longer before drawing a final judgement. Once I’ve used security essentials for a while – I’ll report back with a more conclusive review.

You may be wondering what providers of free antivirus software are doing now that Microsoft is stomping into their territory. Well AVG for one aren’t taking it lying down. They’ve just launched version 9 of their software and added the new feature of shortened link scanning to protect against accessing a malicious site via a shortened URL. This is good news for Social Media fans where short URLs are common place.

If you’d like to know more about Microsoft Security Essentials take a look at: http://www.microsoft.com/Security_essentials/