1. Microoft Security Essentials 4 is the ONLY antivirus software not to get the AV-test certificate out of 23 tested products. Scoring a meare 1.5 points out of 6. Bitdefeder gets the highest score. Check it out at: http://www.av-test.org/en...windows-7/sepoct-2012/
I've been a big fan of Nod32 but the latest test had me change to Bitdefender.
2. Unless you really know what you are doing. Dont disable UAC.

MSE

Also run a detailed scan (with MSE) once a week. If anything is detected then I also run a scan with MalwareBytes which seems to almost always find something if MSE had already detected some issue.

I do this on both my primary DAW and a laptop. The DAW is connected to the net but not really for random browsing. Strictly DL, some forum (Cake, Ableton) stuff, and registrations...some Groove 3 videos but those are pretty rare. The laptop is used in a much looser fashion.

I also watch what is going on like a hawk. Any type of strange behavior and it is an immediate detailed scan as per above. As an example I was being redirected to an unexpected site when selecting a Google search result link. Immediate reboot and start scan process.

Regards,

Interesting thread. My observations after trying most freebies over several years is that if you are using an older machine with few available resources, or are rarely on the net, the MSSE is great as it has a low footprint compared with others. However, it doesn't stack up well with Avast or Avira in the tests. I run Avast out of preference on the gruntier machines as there are no popups to speak of, it's very easy to disable, it up-dates regularly and it shows up well in the tests. I have MSSE on a bunch of old laptops that I use for remote monitoring of sites via IP. I avoid AVG as, the last time I tried it, it looked more like a virus than an anti-virus. It may have changed but feel no impulse to check. David P.S. What's the story here with the formatting in Firefox? Why no paragraphing?

@Counting Coup... This forum doesn't play nice with Firefox. If you want paragraphs you have to type in the HTML or BBcode for break or paragraph. It also won't let you insert HTML in the quick comment box. IE and Chrome work better but they are both security risks. I use Opera with Ghostery and AdBlock+ for this forum and it works fine.

Some people will recommend IE tab for Firefox but if you google around or check out the comments on the Mozilla AddOn pages there are people claiming it has spyware bundled in some of the versions. Cheers.

Oh and AVG used to be pretty good but it slows computers WAY down. Not sure what it's like these days.

Thanks Beep. I'll use Chrome on those rare occasions The world needs my wisdom :-)