Microsoft has confirmed that its Security Essentials antivirus software will be publicly available September 29. It's not available as of the time of this post though. When available it can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

thanks alan.

I think I'm going to give it a try. From what I've read so far, its low on resources.

It looks like you can d/l it now from alan's link


http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

nice piece of software. Using the beta for a few months.

some previous comments about the beta: http://www.bargainshare.com/index.php?show...p;hl=essentials

anyone see any new reviews on how it stacks up against other programs? (now that it's out of beta)

Good to see this out of beta.

I am running it in a virtual machine to see how I like it - so far so good.

I've been running the beta on my Win 7 system. I downloaded the release version, but wanted to see how long it would take for the beta version to tell me an update was available. I did a couple of manual updates that just brought in definition updates, but a couple of hours ago received a notification to download and install the new version. Downloaded and installed in less than a couple of minutes.

One thing about Microsoft Security Essentials - it doesn't actively scan incoming emails or attachments. If an attachment is opened it will be scanned, but it doesn't scan attachments as it is received. There's plenty of debate on whether it's necessary to scan incoming email or just the files/attachments as they're accessed. Looks like Microsoft took the latter approach.

I run ESET NOD32 on a different system. Both of these systems are configured to check the same email accounts. NOD32 is configured to scan incoming email and is finding plenty of viruses as I receive those bogus "package update / order update" emails. The attachments are stripped from the email. Microsoft Security Essentials leaves it alone anuntil the attachment is accessed.