In the last couple of years both a friend of mine and my father used a popular (and free) antivirus. Both of their machines became riddled with viruses. The lesson? Anything free is worth what you pay for it.

sean; it is like it in that it's free and helps prevent viruses, but as speakertoaliens and yourself have experienced anti-virus companies may have mixed motives. Since this is Microsoft presumably they're putting it out only to stop viruses giving their platform a bad name, so you expect their motives to be a bit more in line with what you want.

Also they want to get people installing this because when the software detects virus-like activity it can send in details, and they can update their definition files quicker than if only the people using OneCare are sending in virus data, so by getting it out to everyone OneCare (a product) becomes better. So it's "free", but paid for via other means, unlike an anti-virus company where all money comes in via subscriptions.
If you're familiar with Windows Defender you could say Security Essentials is to Symantec/McAffee anti-virus as Windows Defender is to Ad-aware.

But I've only had it for a few hours, and haven't used an anti-virus for a long time anyway, so I can't say for sure if it's any good but the critics seem to think so (Symantec say it's a piece of garbage, naturally)

I have been using Avast for a few years now. Its free and I have had no complaints.
One thing I am curious about though... my housemate is an IT professional - he has a degree and he's been working for about 10 years - so I assume he knows what he is talking about. He uses no virus protection (windows xp too). He says we don't need virus protection in our house because we have a physical firewall. Can this be right? Or is he deluding himself?

He doesn't believe in Windows updates either. Says they're a waste of time for home computers...

spyman; that "IT professional" is running some big risks by not using Windows Update (/especially/ if he's on XP), these days the first thing you have to do to be secure is always run Windows Update

Also you don't need virus protection, I've been without it for years, but only if you know how to avoid viruses. If you're the sort of person who uses outlook and might open attachments, or you download pirated software/shareware etc and can't tell for sure whether stuff is reputable or not, etc, then a firewall won't protect you in the least and you should use it

Where I work, we use McAfee VirusScan. It is complete crap in my humble opinion. We were recently infected with a variant of the conflicker worm and it wasn't detected until memory sticks were plugged into computers running free Avast! The virus was submitted to McAfee but it was still a few days before the VirusScan definitions were updated to detect it! Even then, it was too late for already infected computers. We also had issues with VirusScan not updating and not notifying that it wasn't updating!

It's bloated (hogging a lot of resources) and fairly useless as far as anti-virus products go. Plus it doesn't play well with other software.

The free version of Avast is much better.

I'll be interested to see how Microsoft's product goes. I would think they would do plenty of testing before releasing it (although knowing Microsoft...)

As for spyman's IT professional friend; he's really asking for trouble not applying security updates to Windows or any other OS. Those updates (the security ones anyway) get released for a reason! Before XP service pack 2 I remember I couldn't even put an unpatched XP box on our network (before installing SP 2) without it getting infected straight away!

I never used to use anti virus software, but these days I think it's pretty much mandatory. Unless your friend is very careful, I bet there would be all kinds of nasties on his machine!

This is thing I don't think he is that careful. He downloads a lot with bittorrents (he has quite a porn collections), including programs. Although he says he tests the files in some kind of virtual environment that is some how excluded from the network (I don't really understand to be honest). He knows a lot of stuff - networking and programing etc and works for a blue chip company, but my I feel that he might be wrong about the risks he is taking. To be honest he is a bit eccentric. He doesn't believe in food poisoning either. (The joys of share-house living *shakes head*).

Well it sounds like he's running a virtual machine in a sandbox kind of environment I guess, but that's kind of an exception to the general rule...

As for food poisoning...!

The "IT pro" you live with has his ways about him. He's not entirely right (he's definitely wrong about Windows updates), but there's no reason you should bother trying to change him. Just don't let him dictate your security policy. Get yourself this free Windows AV or AVG (free.grisoft.com), and make sure you have automatic updates turned on.

I'm using the new Microsoft Security Essentials and, while it has a slightly larger memory footprint than AVG Free (~5MB vs ~2MB), it at least never nags me to buy anything. So far, I'm not looking back.

AVG Free was great until they added the advertising for their paid version and that stupid LinkScanner and made it difficult to disable antivirus protection.

Another thing is that Microsoft SE also does anti-spyware/malware, and AVG Free only does anti-virus, as far as I could see.

Dune, the latest AVG doesn't nag you, I run it on everything, and install it on every friend and relatives' machine I fix (which seems to be a lot of them these days). They got a lot of flak about the pop-ups and changed it. You may have to do a total reinstall but that's not much effort for anybody who knows what they're doing. I'm told Avast is better but it has a gigantic footprint, and I've had no trouble with AVG.

McAfee and Symantec/Norton are probably the two worst pieces of software in common usage today. It's a shame, too, the Norton product line was the definition of bad-ass until Symantec bought them. But McAfee was always overrated.

Glad Kestas posted about the MS product, I haven't been following it. I'll have to go dig up some tests and reports and see how it stacks up.

I'm running MSE now and I'm not sure I'll ever go back to AVG.

OMG!! finally an anti-virus i can afford :-)

Can I just clarify a few details here... Are we talking about a free product from MS that significantly protects the operating system that MS sells? Even if it works well, is there not something ironic there?

With Win 7 being so new, why couldn't this application be bundled and properly integrated?

If they did that they could expect another $50 billion fine from the EU flashman, for stifling competition. Don't expect the EU to notice that the competition bites, and that MS is probably only entering because the shoddy offerings out there make their OS look bad. :-(

@kestasjk: I'm sure the EU won't mind as long as it's not bundled. The EU doesn't mind if Microsoft makes products for everything, they only really care if they bundle them with the OS.

Sorry, I just re-read. Yes, I agree with you kestas.

But... OS's already come with security features, and there is an argument that the anti-virus programs out there have only existed because of weaknesses in these OS's. Can a car manufacturer not put better anti-theft devices on its vehicles? I'm not convinced that MS could not do a better job with the initial OS.

But, your point is taken. I await news of the efficacy of the package. We have a few Windows machines at home and it might be just the ticket.

Back in the days of MS.blaster and the like, when viruses could jump from computer to computer without any interaction, you'd have a point flashman, but MS has come a long way since then. These days viruses are really almost always installed due to user carelessness

Since Vista with inbound firewalls, memory with no-execute-bits, address space layout randomization, limited user accounts by default, and browser sandboxing, it really is pretty hard to write a virus to actually exploit an OS (or even application) flaw. The days of Blaster are dead and gone, and now viruses travel via e-mail attachments, pirated software, malware/shareware/badware etc, and either way probably with lots of warnings from the OS saying "this is probably a virus, are you really sure?" (or even warnings from the virus itself at the bottom of the EULA when you install it)

Now I think anti-virus software is more about cleaning up after careless users that protecting against a real threat (and we're all careless sometimes)

I run several different anti-virus programs. It might not be efficient, but I'd rather be safe than sorry. If I'm doing anything processor-intensive I tend to run Linux anyway.

I can happily deal with the virus problem on my work machines, but my family members use Windows a lot (exclusively in the case of the Mrs) so viruses are a problem from time to time.

Anyone up for writing a virus that tracks down and destroys viruses... a phage in other words? I'd like to be good enough to do that.

There are quite a few pieces of malware that use other malware to distribute themselves, but one of the worst of the recent ones (which I cleaned off several relatives' machines around January/February) would go in and remove a bunch of other malware to ensure a "clean" environment for itself. The original "worm" in the 70s was taken out by another worm that was written to track it down.

More recently when the Nimda virus hit Microsoft SQL boxes, there was another virus... Nachi, I think it was called... that tried to download the patches needed to stop Nimda and Code Red. But it ended up generating so much traffic that it was pretty much treated as malware, too.

But I came back to this thread to post that since I've encouraged a bunch of novices I know to try MSSE, many have reported back that MSSE detected and cleaned one or more pieces of malware that were variously overlooked by AVG, Avast, or Kapersky.

That's about the best endorsement you could ask for.