I get frustrated by software that is designed to scare and confuse. My Mum’s anti virus software has her anxious about using the computer. She uses McAfee, and the warning messages would strike fear into the hearts of anyone. She is convinced that the bad guys are just waiting to pounce when she visits a web page. She only browses, doesn’t download anything at all, and calls me regularly about scary warning messages and pop up alerts on her machine.
So that’s why I’m so relieved that Microsoft Security Essentials, Microsoft’s free anti virus program, codenamed Morro has finally been released for everyone to download. It sits quietly in the corner of the PC, scanning away and alerts if it finds anything dodgy. Of course, it sits on all of our home PC’s seemingly quiet, and not “doing” anything. no alerts, no warnings. Is it working at all? Well, on Sunday I had a chance to find out.
Over a glass of wine at my friend June’s house, we got onto the subjects of the pop up messages that were appearing on her machine. She had let her antivirus subscription run out, as I’d been talking about Morro for ages, so I installed it onto her machine and ran a quick scan. Nothing, thank goodness. So we chatted some more over a glass of wine whilst I finished installing all of the Microsoft updates she needed for her PC, and up came a popup. Woohoo! it found something. A malicious piece of adware hiding in her son’s Limewire Client addons folder. I’d uninstalled Limewire weeks ago and warned them about the possibility of trojan software and malware being installed on the quiet with Limewire. Within 30 minutes, Security Essentials had found the foul file, and cleaned UP the PC. Very Very impressive indeed.
No scary messages, no dire threats or warnings, and no annoying flashing warnings. It just does the job quietly and efficiently – as it’s supposed to. Nice one.
So it will be installed onto my Mum’s PC as soon as possible and the conversations we have can focus on things like family – instead of the latest pop up on her PC …
