Microsoft Security Essentials

[floppybootstomp]

My AMD Dualie 3.2Ghz XP machine had Antivir installed but it went flakey, kept shouting about 'Administrator rights' and did not automatically start Autoguard whatever it's called. So I thought I'd try something else.

Have Avast on the Win 7 machine and Antir working well on the Vista machine so thought I'd try the offering from Redmund.

The first thing it done was check my copy of Windows XP was legal. I hate that. AVG, Avast and Antivir don't do that. I wondered why the hell I was bothering with an MS product, albeit free.

Installed it and the first thing I noticed was everything had slowed down. Was just about to uninstall it, wondering whether it would be a clean uninstall, when decided to give a reboot. That cured it, back to normal.

Started a full scan, 5 HDD's on this machine - 250Gb; 750Gb; 320Gb and a pair of 120Gb's.

Four hours later it was one third of the way through the 250Gb drive (C Drive) and had identified Diskeeper 7's update scheduler as dangerous. WTF? maybe MS are right, I dunno, but seemed odd to me, I've been using that program for about 9 years now within Win 98 & XP, no other protective software has ever identified it as dangerous.

I aborted the scan as I wanted to play a little CoD 1 online and didn't fancy a slow ping.

When I went to shut down I noticed auto-update had been enabled. Within XP I have NEVER had auto-update enabled, always custom update, I like to see what Microsoft want to foist upon me.

This cheesed me off a great deal

I haven't uninstalled it yet though, I'm going to let Microsoft Security Essentials do a full scan overnight, it will probably take that long. And see what it comes up with.

I really hate all that Microsoft paranoia about being ripped off, for gawd's sake they is the richest company on the planet, lighten up

Anyhow, undecided, my view is that either it's very good and very thorough, or it's just another Microsoft bunch of manure.

We shall see.

 

[Ian]

I've used MSE on a few machines and found it surprisingly good . That and Avira Antivir both do very well in comparative tests, so I'd stick with it for a bit and see how it does for you .

On the older machines I've stuck it on (2.8Ghz P4, 1.3Ghz Pentium M) it runs much better than other choices that I've used in the past and it's done well so far.

The Diskeeper 7 file may be a false positive - so you could try running it through this and see what happens:

http://www.virustotal.com/

It checks any single file with all of the major AV scanners - quite clever

 

[floppybootstomp]

I let MSE run overnight and all it found was another instance of RegScheduler.exe.

I let MSE remove it but as I'd physically removed the one from Diskeeper I'll assume this RegScheduler was in another app.

This executable file, apparently, sends all your relevant information to the software publishers supposedly just to register their product but of course they then have all your personal info for whichever databases they care to supply it to.

So it's probably worth losing any instance of it.

Which means, I suppose, a heads up for MSE as neither Antivir; Avast; SuperAntiSpyware or MalwareBytes identified it as a threat.

I've since rebooted and the RegScheduler.exe wasn't reinstalled within Diskeeper's folder.