Free stuff is always good, especially when it is of a good quality nature and while I’ve long used AVG’s free anti-virus offering (after having ditched the very user unfriendly ClamWin) on my personal machines, I’ve now found myself shifting over to Microsoft’s very own offering, namely Microsoft Security Essentials – free to use for anyone running a genuine copy of Windows.

It provides, as all anti-virus packages do, real-time protection against viruses, spyware and other malicious software, is particularly easy to install and integrates rather nicely into Window thanks to the fact it comes from the same software development house. As per the norm, updating is all automatic and in general it runs nice and seamlessly, without bothering you too much at all – and in general is just a pretty efficient, background-running, non-obtrusive Windows application.

And it features a nice shiny green icon too – which obviously must mean it’s on the good side of the Force.

(On the plus side, it seems to work pretty nicely as an anti-virus package as well).

So there you have it. If you are looking for a cheap, powerful way of protecting your PC and are perhaps tired of forking over all your hard earned dosh to guys like Symantec, go ahead and give Microsoft Security Essentials a spin on your home machine! It’s not half bad at all! :)

Related Link: http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/