microsoft security essentials

Microsoft’s Security Essentials Causes Performance Problems

I was all for MS Security Essentials when I heard the announcement of its release (see Microsoft Security Essentials Goes Live and Microsoft Security Essentials is a Game Changer). I installed it on all my machines. Then, I had some big time performance issues. My desktop machine slowed to a crawl and would often take the better part of 10-15 seconds just to repaint the screen. I experienced random lockups where the mouse pointer just froze and nothing would happen. I would start typing in a browser address bar (both IE and Firefox) and I’d have to wait several seconds before any characters would show up.

I didn’t attribute this to MSE. Instead, I got rid of my background picture on the desktop, defragmented my registry, defragmented my page file and did all of those things I normally do to completely tune up a machine. No joy.

Then, Panda came out with version 1.0 of Cloud Antivirus and I commented on that: Panda Cloud Antivirus Emerges From Beta. I said “slight” performance issues had been evident with MSE. I was wrong: They were major, and I’m not the only one who has experienced that. Here’s a comment I just got on my Ask the Geek blog:

nothing was working for me…until I disabled microsoft security essentials - which apparenlty came with Windows 7! I prefer another malware program and virus program anyway…then I did a msconfig service cleanup of all the crap (including stopping ms sec essentials)….everything’s been loading great.

Evidently, MSE isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and I stand corrected. BTW, Panda is doing fine and I no longer have the performance problems. Microsoft, please get it right for once.

Who else is having problems? Comments welcome.

Microsoft Security Essentials Goes Live

Microsoft Security Essentials is now out of beta and ready for download.

The Microsoft Security Essentials team has this to say:

Microsoft Security Essentials (formerly codenamed “Morro”) is the newest security product from Microsoft that helps protect consumers against viruses, spyware and other malicious software. The program, using the same technology as the Forefront product family, is designed to protect and take the guess work out of you wondering if you are protected or not.

If you’re green, you’re good.

Red or yellow means there is something that needs to be done to keep your PC secure. A single click and the PC is back to the green protected state.

Microsoft Security Essentials is also designed to address cost and other barriers that have prevented many of our customers from running up-to-date security protection on their PCs. Because there are no subscription fees, there is no registration required to collect billing or other personal information.

It also runs quietly in the background scheduling scans when the PC is most likely idle and interrupting the user only when there is an action required to keep their PC secure. It employs practices like active memory swapping and CPU throttling to limit the impact on your PC performance, even on older or less powerful PCs.

Sounds good to me. I’m going to recommend it to some of my less-than-savvy clients and see how it works for them. I’ll even try it myself, though I’m not a good candidate for such a thing, being the security Geek that I am. Still, it can’t hurt. The one thing that’s unclear: Is this going to come standard with every new PC, or does everyone have to make the effort to download and install it?

Stay tuned.