yeah, I ended up doing that. Uninstalling/reinstalling was just a bit of a hassle so I just decided to disable Security Center notifications for antivirus. If anything goes wrong, then MSE's own icon should let me know, right? Thnks for the advise pal!
I know what you mean, I have 4 machines and have different free av's on each. I really don't pay attention at all to this so-called tests. If it works for me, then it's in my list, just like MSE.
Yep, along with slowing down the opening of any app, and waiting for my USB stick to become usable is torture.
Why would it affect some users and not others? It's not like conflicts with other installed software, it's the web traffic. If it doesn't slow me down it won't slow you down. Unless there are conflicts with other installed software, like firewalls or whatever.
That's the million $ question for any software. Some hate this because it did that, while others say they have no issues. For me, on my machines, MSE is far from light, but if it works great for you on your machines, that's all that matters.
I find that MSE slows down my browsing, compared with avast!, by around 3% as measured by speedtest.net. Detecting the USB drives and .exe icons on the hard drive also takes quite a bit longer than with avast!. However, this is older hardware (a 2010 Win 7 64-bit lappy with only 3 GB RAM), so the slowdown is not completely unexpected. Despite the modest slowdown, MSE has been less buggy than avast! on this particular laptop, so I'm sticking with it for now.
I just wanna share my recent experience with MSE on my Asus EeePC 1002 HA netbook 1GB RAM (XP Pro SP3) It installed without any problems and it seemed to run OK for a while. My browsing was slower than my usual choice of AV, but still acceptable. The amount of RAM was my first flag about something not quite right about it: using Chrome with 3 tabs open, usage was a staggering 950 MB (normally 700 MB with something else), definitely critical on a 1GB RAM machine, and no, I'm not going to buy another Giga to accommodate an AV). Then yesterday when I tried to update Windows (Tuesdays updates), while the machine was checking for what to update it froze, and I had to restart it via the main switch. Tried again, same results. I thought strange it never happened before, maybe MSE has something to do with it. I try to uninstall it through 'Add or Remove Programs' and guess what, while uninstalling it froze my computer again... Ouch! I can't even uninstall it! Well sorry MSE but out you go with my next image restore. I'm disappointed this isn't just a glitch on a machine, it was a total disaster from an application made by Windows for Windows. Go figure why.
Let me explain why this happens? MSE is not optimized for Windows XP the same way it is for Windows 7 for example. Just one example I can provide - in the most recent version for Windows 7 there is a self-protection, but not in XP. Windows XP is dead OS for Microsoft no matter they officially support it till 2014. Any updates make the OS slower and slower. Microsoft does not put any efforts in XP or in Vista (but XP for sure). They want it dead as soon as possible - this is absolutely sure info I share from internal sources. They are kind of correct if you ask me because XP's code dates back to 1999, which in the technical world is too much. Anyway, to make MSE run well on low end machines such as the eeePC notebook with 1GB RAM, after you install MSE you can do the following: 1. Start MSE and perform full scan - MSE will cache the files and will not scan again something it knows is clean. This will greatly improve performance 2. Disable archive scanning. This will also improve the performance but just a little 3. Disable Automatic updates - Windows/Microsoft updates. By default MSE turns them ON (automatic) which starts to take a lot of network and machine resources - this is not OK for XP and low end machines. I have experience with Microsoft antimalware products - MSE for home users doesn't work well on XP and especially on old or low-end netbooks. The business products work a little better on XP, even though they share AM engines. Microsoft antimalware runs fine on newer OS such as Windows 7/8.
I do not intend to contradict you, but my experience with MSE on XP Pro has been quite pleasant. I wonder if it's because I installed after a fresh OS reformat.
er34, thank you for your detailed reply. I also think that MS is not concerned anymore with XP, whether it is a good/bad strategy it's anybody's guess. I completely agree, I had the automatic updates disabled prior the installation of MSE, but I thought that MSE needs this in automatic in order to update its signatures. I'm pretty certain you are right, at this stage it's not a problem at all as I have other options available. I tested it out of curiosity, thinking that after many years of being developed it might just be right for my netbook.
I ve had the same experience with Win XP. MSE was terrible in that case.(WIN XP SP3,Pentium 4,1 GIG Ram) * since then,I understood The Win XP's time has come to its end.
Last weak,I was dealing with an infected system. It had an Updated MSE Isatalled.But the software could not detect the malware. I sent the sample to Virus total and here is the result: ~ VirusTotal Results Removed per Policy ~ Well,I thought it s a Zero Day,so I submitted the file to Miccrosoft. After 3 days,there is no result https://www.microsoft.com/security/...issionId=bd2aebec-6638-4c15-a0b3-775b0bf5558f and MSE is still not detecting: ~ VirusTotal Results Removed per Policy ~ what s going on microsoft?!!!!
Microsoft gobbles up AV ground "Microsoft Security Essentials may not have done well in recent independent tests, but it's now the global leader in security suite market share for the first time since it debuted in 2009, says Opswat's latest study." http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-3667_7-57558372/microsoft-gobbles-up-av-ground/
And they(MS) don't even advertise it (MSE). Just what I predicted here. A very visible trend. One must be blind to argue about this. Online data and my real world experience confirm Microsoft antivirus programs are getting more and more popular, growing usage and market share each and every month. And after about 3 years when new Windows becomes the new Windows 7, with Windows Defender on board, it will gain more than 50% market share among security vendors (especially home users, small and medium businesses). People are using more and more free antivirus programs - another trend. People don't care much about useless tests - another trend. This is the beginning of a long way - but the end definitely stops at "the complete end of 3rd party antivirus programs". It will be party for MS and vendors like SurfRight and Malwarebytes that cooperate with MS programs to provide additional protection. If you can't fight the biggest one, join their team.
