Replies

Fred, I admire and thank you for this comparison!

I venture to claim that I have extensive experience with MSE in real world scenarios. I started testing it in July 2009. Since August 2009 I install it on ALL my customer’s machines. Microsoft finally officially released MSE on Sept. 29th 2009 with no fanfare and no advertising.

You can read my early evaluations here and my most recent article mentioning MSE here.

Here is a quote from the first article:[INDENT]If Microsoft’s MSE keeps its quality promise and manages to slowly either push Norton, McAfee, Trend Micro and others out of business or force them to substantially improve and get cheaper at the same time than Microsoft would have done the public a huge favor. I never believed I would say that!

[/INDENT]

I believe that MS has done an excellent job with MSE.

These experiences and conclusions are derived from over 30 months of usage by a NON Microsoft fan boy on close to 1,000 different end user systems from XP to Win7.

@satrow:
You write: [INDENT]… MSE is hogging the bandwidth with massive updates.
‘Part-time’ users/2nd computers: some machines that are only used for a few hours several times each week often do NOT receive regular updates.
[/INDENT]

How did you determine that the bandwidth hogging was done by MSE?

Your “Part time” users would be well advised to do a manual check and eventual install for Windows Updates anyway BEFORE they even go into their email. That has absolutely NOTHING to do with MSE.

Don’t you know that Automatic Updates is usually only ca. 75% dependable? I urge my customers to check for updates manually once every week – at least. And they do very well with it!

Yes, MSE updates only when the computer is idle, that is when the user is not working and has no programs running that access the web or the like.

Sounds like you and I have come down the same track and reach the same conclusions. As a 30+ year tech I put this piece of software at the top of the list to install on any PC.