Microsoft Security Essentials (aka Morro) is out for public beta [free anti-virus]

Microsoft has a few security products in place helping you protect your beloved computer. The only piece they were missing seems to be a high-competitive and efficient anti-virus product. Now, with Microsoft Security Essential (code name Morro) out, Microsoft finally completed the missing piece and offers the whole security suite to the end users, home users in particular, for free. Good news for the end users but pretty bad for the 3rd party vendors.

The beta is only available to customers in the US, Israel, China, and Brazil but doing a little tweak in your msn live account by changing your country to one of the above will get you passed this limitation and test the beta. After answering 7 survey questions, I was directed to the beta download page and got the installation file downloaded after a few minutes. The download file for Vista and Windows 7 is quite small, only 4.73MB.

Installation process is pretty straightforward but before doing that make sure you have the genuine version of Windows copy installed because the installation needs to validate your copy first before installing the program.

The program is very easy and simple to use. Once it’s installed, the program will be launched automatically and will check the updates once it’s launched.

The settings tab in the program have all basic settings that are required in a typical anti-virus product, e.g. scheduled scan, real-time protection, various exclude options, etc. You can easily change them in Settings to meet your need.

It seems to be a fine working security product that is relatively small (3,876k from my computer) running backend in Windows. It not only protects your computer from virus, but also spyware as well, including Trojans, worms, and other malicious software. And best of all, it’s free. There are no costs or subscriptions required to keep the program up-to-date. And because it’s part of Microsoft products, product upgrades and virus definition data updates are done through Windows update automatically. So there’s no need to worry about missing the latest protection.

It’s a very nice and thoughtful move from Microsoft to most of the end users. And to move it further, the next step to Microsoft will be coming up the same thing in enterprise level.

Microsoft Security Essential Beta via Microsoft