Microsoft Security Essentials – Protects from Viruses, Spyware and Rootkits

Microsoft Security Essentials Beta provide you high-quality protection against viruses and spyware, including Trojans, worms and other malicious software, at no costs.

Microsoft Security Essentials is easy to install and easy to use. Updates and upgrades are automatic, so there’s no need to worry about having the latest protection.

Security Essentials runs quietly in the background without using much system resources, only alerting you if there’s something you need to do. Currently Microsoft Security Essentials beta is available only to customers in the United States, Israel, China and Brazil.

Security Essentials focuses on protecting you against viruses, spyware, rootkits and similar dangers, and does a very good job of it; it containsly only the essential applications, it does not contain extras such as a firewall, identity protection, anti-phishing technology or anti-spam. Security Essentials doesn’t do performance tune-ups, back up your PC, take up too much system resources, and does not cost anything.

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Security Essentials comes in versions for XP and Vista / Windows 7. You need to have a validated copy of Windows. Once installation is complete, the application downloads the latest anti-malware definitions and quickly scans the system.

Once the software has scanned your system, you don’t need to do anything else, unless it finds malware that it wants to kill or quarantine. New anti-malware signatures are automatically downloaded daily, using the Windows Update engine; you can also have the software to check for the latest definitions manually. Security Essentials also provides real-time protection, so it watches your system as you use it and warns you if you’re downloading malware or if your system has been infected. The software also scans your system once a week by default. You can manually override the defaults and set up specific days and times to perform the scans; more about this later.

When Security Essentials finds an infection on your system, you can have it immediately take action against the threat, or you can click Show Details, at which point you’ll be shown as much information as the software has about the threat. When you lick on the Clean Computer option, Security Essentials will either delete the file or quarantine it, depending on the nature of the threat.