Most of you should have already heard of Microsoft OneCare. It was Microsoft's attempt to enter the anti malware market and they failed miserably. The product was average but their problem was user perception..

Well they will soon stop selling OneCare in preparation for their new FREE offering which will be called MS Security Essentials.

LINKS:
OnceCare - http://onecare.live.com/standard/en-gb/default.htm
MSE - http://www.microsoft.com/security_e...als/market.aspx

MS opened up the public beta of MSE  last week and within hours, they reached their 75000 user quota and shut down the beta to new entrants... Sad??? Well take heart. With a little research you may still be able to find the installer on the web. cough.. cough... Softpedia or Download.com

There are versions for XP, Vista and Windows 7 so take your pick.





This is the combination of various MS tools into one small and free product. The download is 4.73MB. Memory usage fluctuated between 10MB (during standard operation) to up to 90MB during an intensive full scan. We will have to wait and see how it performs in its final version but so far so good. I threw a couple of well know viruses at it on a test machine and it caught them no problem.

I doubt this will hurt the major suite products like Trend, Symantec or McAfee.... I think the smaller free products may take a hit when this is released later this year. Who wouldn't want this type of well supported free product?

Pop-ups were almost non existent and it is silent event when updating in the back end. I like what I see so far. If you are aventurous, maybe you want to take the beta out for a spin and let us know what you think.


WHAT DO YOU THINK? Would you switch to a free MS Anti-malware product? What features would you require?