In a relatively unadvertised event, Microsoft released version 2.0 of their anti-virus product, Security Essentials. Ars Technica has a write up on the release but the primary change is that the detection engine is now heuristic based in addition to signature based.
In a nutshell, signature based protection can only detect known threats which have a particular "pattern" identified by their signature, whereas heuristic detection allows the system to pick up potential threats based on behavior. Obviously, this provides better protection but at the risk of potentially more false positives.
Overall, however, Microsoft Security Essentials gets very good reviews so if you want to download the newest version you can get it now. It has not hit Windows Update yet but I imagine it will in the near future for users running the previous (non-beta) version.
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I downloaded MSE back before New Year’s day and wanted to check if I had version 2 or not. Does anyone know how to make that determination? MSE doesn’t seem to have an “About” command available.
When you open MSE you will see the Help option with a drop-down menu in the upper right. You can see the About section there. MSE v2 has a more dark silverish/gray background than the previous version.
When you open MSE you will see the Help option with a drop-down menu in the upper right. You can see the About section there. MSE v2 has a more dark silverish/gray background than the previous version.
I always recommend my friends to use MSE. Because I think it is very serious to block malwares.
I downloaded and installed MSE 2 yesterday. MsMpEng.exe immediately brought my machine to a virtual standstill. After removing MSE MsMpEng.exe was still there and still using all of my processor. I had to disable it through services.msc. MSE 1 had been working OK.
MSE Put my PC to a standstill also had to take it off . what happen Can some ome help out there?
I totally rid my laptop of Norton anti-virus 2010/11, before it expired because I had so much trouble with it. My brother recommended Microsoft Essentials because he was using it with no problems. I’ve had no problems with the first version of it, and I’ve just gotten the elusive update for ME 2.0. As of this writing, (3:00pm2/11/2011) I’ve had no problems with this version either. I’m also running Spyware Doctor that I got from Google. Spyware Doctor will update itself automatically with new definitions, I sincerely hope that this new ME 2.0 does the same. I’m wondering if I’ll have to remove Spyware Doctor at some point but, so far, so good.