Free Virus Protection from Microsoft goes Live

As reported earlier this year Microsoft’s very own free anti virus program, Security Essentials, has now finished its beta trials and is ready for download. The finished version doesn’t look significantly different from the beta but behind the scenes a various bugs and quirks have been fixed. First impressions are very good, it’s reasonably fast, unobtrusive and doesn’t hog resources and according to the experts provides a high degree of protection. Only time will tell if there are any gaps in it defences but if you’re a reasonably low risk user (you avoid dodgy websites, pirate downloads and opening unexpected attachments), and you’re unhappy with your present anti-virus program then it’s worth giving it a whirl. Incidentally, despite warnings about not getting along with other AV programs it didn’t seem to mind sharing disc space with Avast! and AVG on our test machines.