Microsoft’s Security Essentials : 1.5 Million Installs in One Week. Is it the End for Norton?
October 18, 2009 – 11:11 am | by Dave Bonds
How many of you knew that Microsoft released a free anti-virus and anti-malware program this week? I’m guessing not too many.
A friend of mine, Luy, with IT Support Guys, wrote an excellent blog post on how Microsoft has failed to promote their new security app, even on their own search engine Bing.
Well, it’s called Microsoft Security Essentials and it’s available for download from Microsoft. I’ve installed it on several customer computers and have been rather happy with it. I just got around to installing it on a machine of mine, however, because I keep my system from getting infected in the first place, my machine is not really a good testing environment. But I digress…
The stats coming from Lee Matthews at Download Squad:
The Microsoft Malware Protection Center blog has posted some interesting numbers. After its first week, Security Essentials has already been installed more than 1.5 million times. From the approximately 535,000 machines reporting statistics, MSE has logged over 4 million detections.
44% of MSE users are already running Windows 7 with XP following at 33% and the remaining 23% on Vista. The number of detections per OS is also interesting. 52% of the 4 million reported were found on Windows XP systems compared to only 32% on Vista.
Windows 7 users fared even better. Though they represent the largest group of MSE users, only 16% of detections came from systems running Microsoft’s latest OS. The post also reports 1/3 of these machines are using the 64-bit version, which “is even more resistant to malware than 32-bit due to PatchGuard,” states Microsoft’s Joe Faulhaber.
Surprising that over half of the detections come from only 33% of users? Not really.
Go download and try out Microsoft Security Essentials yourself, and let me know in the comments how you like it? Is it better than the paid apps (like Norton or McAfee), or existing free anti-virus (like AVG or Avira)?
2 Responses to “Microsoft’s Security Essentials : 1.5 Million Installs in One Week. Is it the End for Norton?”
I use MSE for myself and several client computers. It seems to have a good detection rate but can consume quite a bit of ram. (around 70MB). Have you heard of Panda's new free Cloud AV? It only takes about 14mb of ram and has a pretty good detection rate too, if you are looking for something a little less intrusive or for an older computer.
RAM usage is high, but lower or comparable to most other AV programs.
Panda Cloud AV — Does that mean it essentially does no local detection? Just sends files to Panda to analyze?