Yesterday saw Microsoft officially ship their free antivirus program – Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE).
MSE has been in the pipeline for some time now – I first wrote about it back in June when the project was known as ‘Morro‘.
This new antivirus program is targeted mainly at the home user, as well as home-based businesses, but may still find things tough vs. the competition, despite being free.
Not only are the top brands well established in the paid antivirus market but there are also plenty of other free alternatives too.
Microsoft Security Essentials is designed to run on desktop machines that run recent versions of Windows, such as XP (service pack 2 onwards), Vista and Windows 7, though the latter would appear to require Windows XP mode to be enabled.
MSE is a replacement for Windows Live OneCare which was discontinued earlier in the summer.
There are, of course, several alternatives available already which are also free – see this list of the best free antivirus of 2009.
If you do decide to give MSE a try then please remember that running more than one antivirus program on a system at the same time can be extremely problematic at times due to conflicts – always remove your old av product before installing a new one.