How good is Microsoft's free antivirus software?

[Jorsoft]

10-50% is a big range, is it slowing down your computer very noticeably?

 

[Trotter]

Not really. It is slowing it down less than F@H does. You have to remember I am jockeying a dinosaur here.

 

[Hefemeister]

At idle it used 70mb of ram.

For a full system scan on my computer it never got higher than 12% cpu usage.
To be honest I could not tell it was running short of the task manager window I had up to watch.

My computer is just a little bit faster than Trotters.

 

[synergy]

So, this is AV only, not like a security suite right? Do they plan on releasing a security suite at some point in time?

I'm going to give this a shot. Logic would assume that MS would be better at detecting malware in their systems than a third-party software developer...but OneCare was a joke.

 

[KSoD]

No this is a security suite all in one.

Anti-Malware, Anti-Spyware and Anti-Virus built into one.

It runs a Anti-Malware app which takes up the most of the resources. The Anti-Virus app takes up very little. It also deactivates Defender has a more up to date Defender type detection system built into it.

Also if you read the topic. OneCare was not a joke. At least not recently.

A new study (May 2009) by the independent AV-Comparatives group gave Microsoft OneCare (which shares the same engine and signatures as MSE) its highest (Advanced+) rating.

This is built off of OneCare and it is 1 of 3 apps to get the Advanced+ Rating. 16 Apps were tested in total. So that is not something to shrug off saying it sucked when it was actually very advanced.

Avast and AVG which we so highly recommend were not the other 2 either. In fact they were not even nearly as good as OneCare as of May 2009. So yeah dont bash it. It turned out to be a very good program. 2 years ago it may have sucked but it turned itself around.

 

[Pinscher]

What were the other two programs that got that Advanced+ rating?

 

[KSoD]

Here is the full list.

Avira 8..0.374 - Advanced
Avast 4.8.1335 - Standard
AVG 8.0.234 - Standard
BitDefender 12.0.11.4 - Advanced
eScan ISS 10.0.946.341 - Advanced
F-Secure AV 9.00.149 - Standard
G Data AV 19.1.0.0 - Advanced
Kaspersky AV 6.0.0.506a - Advanced+
Kingsoft AV 2008.11.6.63 - below standard
McAfee VirusScan 13.3.117 - Advanced
OneCare 2.5.2900.20 - Advanced+
NOD32 AV 3.0.684.0 - Advanced+
Norman AV 7.10.02 - below standard
Norton AV 16.2.0.7 - Advanced
Sophos AV 7.6.4 - Advanced
TrustPort AV 2.8.0.3011 - Standard

For a full review check out the webpage here and the results here. (Results are in PDF format)

So as you see OneCare is actually rated right up there with Kaspersky and NOD32. Above AVG and Avast.

 

[Trotter]

NOD32, huh? So I would be good either way.

 

[Pinscher]

Nice I'm glad to see that Nod32 got the Advanced+ rating because I've had it for 2 years now. Theyre on 4.0 now though so this test is a little outdated but I'm sure it still holds pretty true.

I'm impressed that MS has come out with such a good AV program, especially for free. I pay for NOD32 but its only $90 for 2 years so that's not really much at all considering Norton is $100 for a year and NOD32 is much better.

 

[KSoD]

That test is only a month old. It was from May 2009. But yes it is a good program. Since MSE uses the OneCare engine it will be just as effective.

The only advantage i see so far is that OneCare gave very few false positives as NOD32 and a few more than OneCare. So at least that it a plus.