Ms essentials here to. It just works. 

For whatever the worth, the McAfee founder is literally on the lam with someone and being sought as a material person of interest in the shooting murder of his next door neighbor - might want to put any subscription updates on hold til they sort that out - plus the product is a bunch of hooey anyways.

MS Essentials is indeed quite good - I still like Avast, and with internet service on my system running at 105 mbps (no decimal point there - bwa ha ha), my updates are pretty much instant.

It has a real small footprint in memory, and does not bog down the system - I do not even turn it off prior to doing Sonar sessions.

Bob Bone

Folks,
     I don't really have a horse in this race but.........



     Microsoft's SE has just very recently lost it's rating from the top AV rating group: http://www.guru3d.com/new...curity_essentials.html

     I personally have had multiple customers get really nasty viruses that just skated right past the MS product and all of Symantec's offerings as well.  Check out AVAST for a free AV and NOD32 is rated one of the best and is a great buy for 40 bucks.


     In practice, I never ran AV on my DAW.  Though, I'm pretty meticulous about what gets installed and ran on the box.

I survived the disco years, but am still a little adventurous, and use Avast on mine - I posted earlier that none of them catch all of the nasties.

The McAfee guy on the lam also apparently was claiming to have a double with a false passport and stuff along those lines, so I think I would really have to maybe hold back on that one for a while, although if weirdly entertaining founder news was a product feature they are certainly ahead in that department.

Bob Bone

Interesting Guitardood. So bit defender back on top. ZoneAlarm not too bad either..
Nothing in the list though about performance and footprint, no benchmarks....

http://www.av-test.org/en...windows-7/sepoct-2012/

Norton here.  I keep it on most of the time.  If I have a client in then I might turn it off.
 
I also use studio DAW for surfing as well as updates, sometimes whilst I'm recording.  Not had any problems.  No drop outs, no viruses.

http://www.av-comparatives.org/

Bob Bone

Unfortunately, My machine came cheaper from Dell I'm sure because of agreements with companies like McAfee.... It came installed and hasn't caused problems... Yet... I don't have the machine connected except to download updates and I turn off "Real Time Scanning" before starting up X2.  What I've learned here, is that if my machine DOES start to crash and burn down the road, I'll look at McAfee's built in process of informing me that it's time to update. That seems to have been a culprit in some of these instances. But right now, it ain't broke...so...

Just FYI, ESET is the NOD32 I mentioned above.  Take a look at the performance/detection ratios.

Also there is a site, www.virscan.org, where you can upload a virus file and have it scanned by most of the relevant AV software.  I use these types of tests in conjunction with the aforementioned reports to help decide what to recommend to computer clients.

Being a programmer, I always bear in mind that most of the heuristic algorithms can easily be beaten by a good programmer who is bent on hosing your computer and is not using a virus-kit borne virus that has a known footprint.

Some platitudes:    "Best defense is a good offense" - Adage
                             "The only winning move is not to play" - Joshua
                             "No Warez in Therez!" - A Nerdly Associate


-----------------
Guitardood


Soundclick: http://www.soundclick.com/ChuckFletcher
My Site: http://www.musicpreview.com

MSE cause it's free and seems to be unintrusive, light and runs fine with Sonar on my old slow machine fine. 

I've been through all kinds of antivirus and seems like MSE works best. Used to swear by zone alarm until upgrading became so problematic, resource hog and couldn't remove virus. Norton before that with same results as ZoneAlarm.

Bottom line, I think thier all crap. But at least MSE stays out of the way.

Agree with poster saying MSE isn't full proof. 


Just be careful on the Internet.