Security Essentials or Defender?

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Hi all,
I have for a long time now been using MS Security Essentials in my Win7 with no problems until a few weeks ago when it stopped updating.
Thanks to a topic “MS Security Essentials – Win7 – Updates” all is now fixed, thank you everyone 🙂

But this has raised a new question :
Should I still be using MSE or should I use Defender ?

A long time ago I think MSE was preferred for virus and other malware prevention because Defender as then implemented in Win7 only protected against spyware, is this still the case?
The reason I ask is that I have just bought a laptop with Win7 as a backup box ( my main box now being well old !) and to my surprise it has come with a clean install of Win7 with Defender not MSE 🙁

Thanks.

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MS Security Essentials – hands down (NO ands, ifs or buts!)
MS Defender in Win7 is weak by today’s standards and is severely limited compared to MSE & Defender in Win10/11

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MalcolmP

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The following topic in the MS Community, despite dating from 2018, is still accurate:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/windows-defender-vs-security-essentials-on-w7-pro/4c4bb526-dbe2-4638-b05f-4733c47cc882

Security Essentials is a full antivirus program; whereas Defender only protects against spyware. You will, therefore, get much more ‘complete’ protection with SE.

However, given that W7 is out of support and updates, I can’t find a genuine MS source for downloading SE; I would be very reluctant to download it from a 3rd party source.

Personally, I don’t bother with a realtime security program on my Vista laptop anymore; I just use ESET Online Scanner to do a weekly scan. Avast/AVG’s Free Antivirus is still available for XP-Vista-7 if you want a reasonably up-to-date security package, though.

1 user thanked author for this post.

MalcolmP

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