Microsoft Security Essentials is very easy to use. It doesn’t have too many features to confuse a basic computer user.

Virus detection (Signature and Proactive)
The virus detection on MSE  detect all 19 viruses as a potential threat while RISING Antivirus 2009 (sad to say) only detected 75% of it.

Scanning
MSE has an average scanning speed as I’ve seen other antivirus software that scans at much faster and slower speed than this.

Real-Time protection
Real-time protection is a little slow.

Action on detected items
Removing and disinfecting an item is also very slow.

Memory and CPU usage
There are 2 processes by MSE which is MsMpEng.exe and msseces.exe. Both process’ memory usage takes up an average of 60MB during idle and scanning. When running a full scan, the CPU usage goes up to around 40% but never above 50%.

The tests above are done on my laptop running a version of Windows Vista Home Premium SP2 with latest hotfix. Do take note that Microsoft Security Essentials is still in BETA (testing) and if you’d like to try it yourself, you can download from the links below. The installer does a WGA check before allowing you to install.

For Windows XP: mssefullinstall-x86fre-en-us-xp.exe
For Windows Vista and Windows 7 (32-bit): mssefullinstall-x86fre-en-us-vista.exe
For Windows Vista and Windows 7 (64-bit): mssefullinstall-amd64fre-en-us-vista.exe

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