Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0 review

When we looked at the beta of Microsoft Security Essentials in 2009, we were impressed with its clean, easy-to-use interface, but less so with its sluggish scan speed. This still holds true for Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0. Also, it hasn't kept pace with newer antivirus products when it comes to detecting malware.

Microsoft Security Essentials is well designed and easy to use. Installation is simple and straightforward, although it will verify whether your copy of Windows is legit along the way. Once you install it and open it, you'll be greeted by a thoughtfully designed main screen.

This screen has four tabs:

• Home (which shows status information, scan controls and an update button if your virus definitions are out of date)
• Update
• History (which logs all of the malware cleaned from your system)
• Settings

Security Essentials has a green/yellow/red colour-coded status bar that runs across the top of the window, as is common in antivirus software, and the Home tab gives you more details as to your PC's protection status.

Malware tests

While not terrible, Microsoft Security Essentials lagged behind the top performers in our recent antivirus roundup at detecting malware using traditional scanner-based detection methods (which rely predominantly on malware definition files), detecting 92.7 percent of samples.

This was the second-lowest score of the free antivirus products (Comodo's free Internet Security Premium was slightly worse, detecting 92.4 percent of samples), and is well behind the top performers, which detected over 99 percent of malware samples.

Security Essentials logged the lowest score in tests to see how well it could block real, live malware attacks. In these real world attack tests, it completely blocked 64 percent of attacks, and partially blocked an additional 8 percent of attacks.

No free antivirus product was able to fully block all attacks, but Comodo scored a 96 percent blocking rate. This is a good test to determine how well security products can block brand-new, still unknown malware.

On the other hand, once an infection is on your PC, Security Essentials will do a relatively good job at cleaning it up: It detected all infections on our test PC, and removed all active components of an infection 70 percent of the time, about average for the products we reviewed. And it managed to completely clean up 50 percent of infections, tops among the contenders.

Security Essentials' scan speeds are among the slowest among products we looked at, as well. It completed our on-demand scan test, which simulates how long it will take to manually scan 4.5GB of data, in 3 minutes and 24 seconds, the second slowest performer in this test.

The top performer, Avira AntiVir Personal, completed the test in 87 seconds. Security Essentials was also on the slow side in on-access scan speed tests, which judge how well a product can scan files as they're opened or saved to disk: It did the deed in 5 minutes and 41 seconds, a full 2 minutes behind the leader.

Despite the slow scan speed, Security Essentials had a fairly low impact on overall PC performance. It added less than 1 second to startup times in our tests, and finished most of our other system speed tests with better than average scores.