Today I installed Microsoft security essentials, Normally I am not a fan of anything Microsoft, and this probably won’t change that. But I figured I better give it a go! The first quick scan took 16 minutes. not too shabby I guess for 64K files, provided it works of course.

One area that does worry me is the information collection. they collect a lot of information and some of it seems a bit dubious as to its application as antivirus. really they shouldnt need to care what programs I use. I don’t/won’t use IE, but should they need to know I use firefox or chrome? It seems they are ‘scanning’ for more things than just viruses.

Even given that I have chosen to send basic information to Microsoft’s poorly name Spynet.

Massive False Positives (March 26, 2011 at 11:52 pm)

I have removed MSE from my computer. it had a brain fail and reported everything as infected. shutting down ALL applications. I couldn’t even get Task Manager running it reported a virus in the executable and refused to let it run.

After restarting the PC in safe mode and doing a full virus scan with both MSE and Antirvir it came up as clean. I can only assume either a transient memory virus that was wiped when I restarted infected my PC or MSE failed. I uninstalled MSE and the problem has not re-occured.