I never expected this. Microsoft is famous for its greed for money and go about overcharging everything and expecting money wherever ethically should be free. I mean seriously, if a dad buys a product, he has to buy a separate license, if he has to share it with his son. Legally seems right, but ethically NOT.
Now who would expect somebody like that to give away stuff for free, right?? That’s exactly what Microsoft did. They made a security suite and its FREE for anybody with a genuine windows.
The installer is just under 5MB(for my Windows 7 x64) and the installation happens in warp speed. The time takes when you do your very first update. You see, Microsoft made the installer in such a way that it does not contain any virus definitions at all. So, this is definitely not to be installed on a PC tats already infected.
The settings are all great and easy to understand. So, it scores a lot for user-friendliness. However, I do miss the option of customizations which however only an advanced user like myself would expect. However theres one thing. The website says that it updates automatically. But I don’t see it being atleast mentioned anywhere in the UI of the software. I used to have my bitdefender set to check for updates every 5 mins. I was looking for the similar option. So, guess I’l have to simply trust the website on that.
Now for the test. My dad’s office network has a huge collection of viruses that any flash drive thats inserted on a PC there, gets infected with viruses. I guess its the sys/net-admins of his office that are to be blamed. When I inserted the same flash drive in my laptop, it caught and removed 10 viruses from it and cleaned up the infected files. I had it rescanned by my bitdefender at my desktop PC to make sure nothings left and to my surprise, nothing was left.
Performace-wise, it doesn’t feel like theres an overhead at all. It is lite as well as powerful that it doesn’t cause anything to slow down(I am using it in HP G60-533CL with Windows 7 Home Premium) and yet keeps the system protected. As of version 1.0, theres no additional firewall. It just uses the Windows Firewall. Hopefully the upcoming versions will be a really complete security suite.
So, here it is; the same quality of service given by a $79 to $99 product for FREE(provided you have genuine windows, which you get it automatically when you buy a computer these days). I give it all 5 stars.
P.S : I just read that this is the only free software thats been given an “Advanced+” rating by AV-Comparitives, putting it in par with BitDefender and Kaspersky.
