Microsoft Security Essentials (Morro) is Anti-Virus actually worth having!

Myself, like many of you I am sure, hate anti-virus products.  In fact, I hate them so much that I haven’t ran an anti-virus product on any of my machines for a good 5 years.  (I have ran them for limited runs to beta test them, etc.)  Why do I hate anti-virus software?  Because I have had far more problems and issues caused by anti-virus products than I’ve ever had caused by a virus.  (And in those 5 years I’ve never gotten a virus because through simple common sense you can avoid infections.)  They are full of bloat with ‘features’ I don’t want, they chew up massive amounts of resources, cause horrible system slowness, are incredibly in-compatible breaking apps, even caused BSD’s, etc.  So, when Morro was announced that Microsoft was going to make a free, simple and clean AV product which was more about saving themselves money by preventing virus’s and thus support calls than anything else I had hope that we would finally have a simple anti-virus that does nothing but AV and stays out of my way.  I figured it would still hog resources and impact system performance though.

Like many of you, I have now installed Morro and it’s shockingly simple.  The install was as easy as it gets, it asked if it could automatically download updates and run a quick scan.  I said yes, and the scan was done in under 10 minutes, even though I have 2 large hard drives with a lot of files on this system.  It only has 3G of RAM, and an AMD 3200+ processor (so not exactly a speed demon.)  Then guess what happened after that?  I closed it, and it disappeared.  It’s not even in my system tray by default (Windows 7) and it doesn’t harass me every day telling me that it’s updated itself.  In fact, most of the day I don’t even remember it’s there.  I haven’t noticed any impact on my system performance but it is working in the background.  (When I ran AngryIP scanner it decided that was a possible threat, prevented the app from running and asked me what action I wanted to take.  I selected allow, and it’s never bothered me about it again!)  Truly this is the AV app I’ve been waiting for, and what makes it even better is that it’s free.  I am now running it on all my machines in my house and have yet to have any bad experiences.

So, if you haven’t had a chance to get Morro, I suggest you get it now before the downloads stop! - http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

*Update*

So, if you didn’t get your hands on Morro I’m afraid it’s too late now, the downloads have stopped.  But, keep an eye on the site for the next release!

Follow Me on Twitter