MSE was top-notch when it was first released. It aced all the malware detection benchmarks, not to mention it was completely ad-free and extremely lightweight, which was unheard of in the free antivirus market. The high detection rate and low performance impact made lots of Windows users flock to MSE, myself included.
Nowadays, MSE is still lightweight, but it sits at the bottom of every malware detection benchmark. I've been recommending MSE to everyone around me, but recently they started getting all sorts of malware despite keeping MSE up to date. All of these were easily detected and removed by avast!, BitDefender, and Malwarebytes, but MSE just sat there like a cow, oblivious to the malware's presence.
Why has Microsoft let MSE rot like this? Now that MSE is built into Windows 8, are they afraid of getting slapped with antitrust fines if they shipped an antivirus that can actually compete with third-party offerings?
This year, I'm moving my family off of MSE. So long, it was good while it lasted. But third-party antiviruses have caught up in the meantime, and now they're just as lightweight as MSE.
Nah I will stick with MSE because the alternative for me is not to use an antivirus. If you ever want to know how to bring a 8-core i7 to its knees, install Norton. MSE is the only antivirus that is lightweight, stays out of your way and the least annoying of everything out there and not to mention its free with no ads. Sure, it doesn't have an heuristic scanning but it did once do a good job of detecting a malware that both Avast and Norton missed, which is good enough trust for me. The best feature is that it doesn't have a girl screaming "Avast, Your database have been updated." or "Your license is about to expire in 90days unless you pay $$$" every 4 hours.
Don't download anything sketchy, keep an updated version of your browser, don't run yourself as root and your should be fine for 99.9% infections out there. For the rest just keep MSE around.
You forgot the top two other pieces of advice - Make sure you have a decent adaptive firewall, and run anything even slightly worrisome in a virtual machine, never on your main operating system.
You are right, those too. I would also recommend Sandboxie[1], not sure on its effectiveness but the convenience to just right click and run apps in its own sandbox is huge. Does anyone know an open source alternative to it?
Also on Windows, consider looking at Software Restriction Policies. For my host partition, I have things configured to deny execute for anything not in Windows (and excluding some temp/cache dirs). So if I step away for a minute and someone tries to download and run an exe, Windows should prevent it. Would also prevent me from drunkenly saving cute.jpg.exe to my desktop and running it.
It's sad. However instead of ditching it entirely I have moved to a combination of MSE for real-time protection and Malwarebytes as backup, which I run every month or so to get anything that might manage to slip through.
I've been doing exactly that, but by the time Malwarebytes catches the virus, the damage might already be done. So even if you use Malwarebytes for occasional scans, there is legitimate need for better realtime protection.
Maybe I should get the paid version of Malwarebytes that can also do realtime scans?
The support team was unwilling to acknowledge and escalate my report that it failed to install the correct msvcrt, it just hopes it is already present.
(Which usually isn't a big deal, but it's not a way end user software should ever fail either)
I noticed the same. MSE is generally great, but it feels like IE 6 back in 2005 (no investment in years)... :(
Running a multi GB backup with Microsoft's robocopy cmd utility crashes the MSE service. That's really annoying.
Given that "Microsoft Forefront" is a rebranded MSE (it can be controlled over the network), I wonder why its real-time scanner can't handle ~100MB/s IO for several hours.
Nowadays, MSE is still lightweight, but it sits at the bottom of every malware detection benchmark. I've been recommending MSE to everyone around me, but recently they started getting all sorts of malware despite keeping MSE up to date. All of these were easily detected and removed by avast!, BitDefender, and Malwarebytes, but MSE just sat there like a cow, oblivious to the malware's presence.
Why has Microsoft let MSE rot like this? Now that MSE is built into Windows 8, are they afraid of getting slapped with antitrust fines if they shipped an antivirus that can actually compete with third-party offerings?
This year, I'm moving my family off of MSE. So long, it was good while it lasted. But third-party antiviruses have caught up in the meantime, and now they're just as lightweight as MSE.