Stuart said:
Is my understanding correct that MSE is replacing Defender even though
Defender will be distributed with Win 7?
Is my assumption correct that MSE will become a regular topic here?
Does installation of MSE disable Defender or uninstall it?
MSE includes Defender. There would be no point in running both. When
you run MSE, you'll see the processes from "Microsoft Malware Protection
Engine" (MSMPENG) which is in Defender. Installing MSE will disable
Defender because Defender is in MSE.
Defender is not an anti-virus program. It covers spyware and adware.
They're adding anti-virus and malware components in MSE along with
revamping the UI. If they put their RAV product (that they bought in
2003 from GeCAD) into MSE, that AV product has fared poorly in AV
comparative testing and why OneCare was never a top contending AV
program (slowly inching up to nowadays only getting just past 90% while
Avira, Avast, and AVG have had far better coverage all along).
Unlike other [free] AV solutions that have their own scheduling for
signature and program updates, Windows Defender forced you to enable
Automatic Updates (automatically download and install) unless you were
willing to put up with the nuisance of getting prompted (notify only)
and then manually downloading and installing the updates. I suspect
Microsoft will follow suite in MSE to get updates to it. According to
PC Mag's review, MSE sets the Automatic Updates service into automatic
mode.
Since Microsoft is planning to release MSE in a few weeks (close to the
release of Windows 7), I wouldn't be surprised that they try to push it
hard through Windows Update as they did with Internet Explorer 8.