Yesterday, the first screenshots of Microsoft's "Morro" Anti-Virus software leaked to the web, and today, the whole application followed suit.
With a UI similar to that of Windows Defender, Microsoft Security Essentials (aka. "Morro") is Microsoft's upcoming free Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware solution, based on the core of Microsoft's current paid solution, OneCare. Windows Live OneCare will be yoinked off of store shelves on June 30th this year, with MSE's final release anticipated shortly after.
I decided to take the opportunity today to gather some basic performance statistics on Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) including what kind of impact it has on system performance. I installed MSE on my own system with the following specifications:
- Intel Xeon E3110 overclocked from 3.0Ghz to 3.6Ghz
- 8GB DDR2-1066Mhz RAM
- Nvidia GeForce 9600GT
- 64GB Solid State Drive
- Windows 7 build 7229 x64 (Completely fresh installation)
I analyzed the total boot time, from the moment the boot screen appears to the moment the desktop finishes loading, shut down time, total system memory usage and total disk usage. Here are the results:
Before Installation:
- Boot time: 18.084 seconds
- Shut down time: 5.316 seconds
- Memory usage: 11% (929 MB)
- Disk usage: 21.507 GB
After Installation:
- Boot time: 18.342 seconds
- Shut down time: 5.714 seconds
- Memory usage: 12% (983 MB)
- Disk usage: 21.673 GB
If that wasn't enough to impress, MSE took only a mere 25 seconds to install. It is quite clear from these results that MSE has very little impact on system performance and only takes up roughly 170MB of disk space once fully updated, which is more than reasonable compared to other security software.
A few notes about these results however. First and foremost, this is still pre-release software. MSE's impact on system performance may differ in the final release, and these results should not be used to judge the final product. Second, the memory usage results are based on a system with 8GB of RAM. Applications are designed to allocate more memory on systems with more RAM, therefore it is more important to look at the percentage of RAM used and not the total amount, as the results will vary on systems with less RAM. Finally, all of these tests were performed on a system with a Solid State Drive, which are still fairly uncommon in most systems today, and the timing may differ on systems with Hard Disk Drives.
All in all though, so far, MSE is showing the signs of a true competitor. Of course, nothing can really be said until the scanning engine is put to the test.
Download: Microsoft Security Essentails (Build 1.0.2140.0) for Windows Vista and 7 32-Bit
Download: Microsoft Security Essentails (Build 1.0.2140.0) for Windows Vista and 7 64-Bit
Download: Microsoft Security Essentails (Build 1.0.2140.0) for Windows XP 32-Bit
Source: JCXP
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