Just over a year ago, I wrote about the free Microsoft Security Essentials that I have adopted for use on our office PCs. Just a few days ago I was first prompted to upgrade Version 1 on my home PC to Version 2. Without hesitation, I did and was surprised at how quickly and easily it upgraded.
No annoying having to ‘uninstall first’ messages or ‘restart after upgrade’ pop-up. It simply ran through the setup process, asked a few questions, and completed the upgrade, and that was it.
I have been running it at home since and am very happy with it.
After doing a bit of research on Version 2, I actually found out that it was officially released to the public mid December 2010. Not quite sure why it took this long to get the upgrade notification, but perhaps there was a reason – maybe a slow roll-out to the public?
I’ve also had a closer look at this new version to see what’s new and improved, and made the below list based on what I’ve come across so far.
- MSE2 has been integrated into the Windows built-in Firewall to provide better monitoring via traffic from external (internet) as well as internal (LAN) networks.
- The anti-malware engine has been updated which improves detection and its ability to clean affected files. Performance has also been improved.
- You can now specify the CPU usage during scheduled scans. This is great if you do not want it to utilise 100% of the CPU’s time (who does
) So even if the PC is idle and the scan starts, it will only use the percentage specified for scanning. - The Update tab now reports when the definition was last updated, and when it was last checked. This helps to see if the software still checks for updates regularly (although I’ve not noticed a problem with this in the past).
- Quarantined files can now be automatically deleted after a specified time, to ensure files do not get collected on your hard drive. This option however is disabled by default.
- … Probably many more to list that I haven’t found yet
So there you go. If you have been using Microsoft Security Essentials Version 1, be sure to upgrade to version 2 as soon as you can. If you haven’t been prompted yet to upgrade, and don’t want to wait, you can always to go http://microsoft.com/security_essentials and download it manually.
