Just ahead of the launch of Windows 7 comes Microsoft Security Essentials, their new free anti-virus package based on their award-winning ForeFront corporate security scanning engine.
I wrote last night that this software is being released today and there was an interesting comment from Yatti420 who wrote…
MS should just push MSE to all users.. I notice lots of clients comps coming in now with stuff AVG misses.. MSE is a Microsoft Product that just works well..
This is an interesting point. Many of you will have noticed that Microsoft is already pushing their Live suite and their Office Live plug-in as optional updates in Windows Update. It could easily be argued that with MSE being much more important to an end user, they should push this too.
First of all we should look at the differences between XP and Vista on the one side and Windows 7 on the other. All of these operating systems will alert you if you don’t have any anti-virus software installed but only Windows 7, and it’s such a simple idea I can’t help but wonder why it’s taken so long to implement, will actively help you choose and download an anti-virus package.
This is important, not so much in the corporate space but in the home, where novice users may have no idea where to get it and might be running expired trial software they got with their PC, unaware that they’re not protected.
There’s also the quality of the scanning engine itself to consider. Yatti420 points out that AVG has, sadly, let itself go a bit in the last few years. It’s still one of the best scanning engines out there but MSE is better, and Microsoft can prove it.
So what about pushing MSE via Windows update. With Windows 7 there’s still cause to do this but not, probably without Windows update integrating with the security centre first to see if you already have up-to-date anti-virus software installed, as having two anti-virus packages on your PC can do more harm than good.
To be honest, much as I’d love to see this happen, I don’t believe that it will. There’s also the fact that, while Windows 7 is much better at alerting users to ‘optional updates’ through the action centre. I’d hardly call anti-virus software ‘optional’. Especially for all those people with no protection at all.
