Today, Microsoft launched their first free antivirus solution for users of Genuine Windows, called Security Essentials. You can pick it up right over here: http://www.microsoft.com/Security_essentials/. All of the downloads are quite small, coming in under 5MB, which is quite a nice departure from the bloat that products like AVG (66MB) have started to carry around. This is partially due to the lack of advertising and browser toolbars, which is unusual to see in a free product.

Setup of this product is a breeze also, with no annoying "Install this too?" prompts. The initial scan on my EeePC 1000HE with full BitLocker encryption on the hard drive took less than 15 minutes, which is quite quick compared to AVG. Also, the system is more responsive than it was with AVG Free on it. Where the AVG real-time scanning process would eat up CPU cycles and introduce delays in program launches, Security Essentials is less intrusive, even on a little Atom.

Hopefully, Microsoft took a page out of the Forefront book for this product, as it scores quite highly with the Virus Bulletin guys and has earned a VB100 seal for properly detecting and removing every virus found in the wild today. We'll have to wait and see if this new Security Essentials can live up to its big brother in that regard.

Finally, SpyNet (which first showed in Defender) makes another appearance in this product, which I think is an excellent feature. Unlike in Defender, Microsoft will require you to participate at a basic level to use Security Essentials, but that's not something we should worry about. In fact, by gathering data about viruses, Microsoft should be able to more successfully detect them, and develop ways to defeat them. Helping our entire society stay safe is all of our responsibilities, and we should all provide as much information as we can towards the goal of virus erradication.

In short, I'm testing Security Essentials now all over my network and I fully expect this to become the de facto standard for home users. In fact, I would expect Microsoft to ship this as part of Windows 8 alongside Defender, or maybe integrated into Defender, to protect everyone from the minute they first boot their PC, and I welcome that. It's much better than the worthless attempt Apple made with Snow Leopard to defend Mac OS.