[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Microsoft's Free Antivirus: Is This An Apology? here

[empirestatebuddy]

Good for consumers. Bad for Norton and McAfee...

[RickBeckwith]

Interesting article. Maybe Microsoft should switch to a Unix based core to prevent viruses the way that Apple did back in the day. Then they can develop their little GUI and be more secure that way, as well as suck up less resources like RAM and CPU power.

[Lciummo]

That sounds right. Switch to an OS designed in the 70's for mini's with 64K. And maybe they switch hardware architectures every few years so everything written for the old machines becomes obsolete. What else, name their releases after zoo animals?

[gundark]

@Lciummo
LOL!!!
(even though you DID feed the troll) ;)

[mickytricky]

I knew before even clicking on the link that this is one of your articles David. And I dont mean that in a good way.
PLEASE DO NOT COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE. IT ONLY ENCOURAGES PEOPLE LIKE DAVID TO WRITE INFLAMMATORY ARTICLES WITH ONLY FANBOY APPEAL TO DRIVE CLICKS AND COMMENTS.
PLEASE IGNORE ARTICLES FROM THIS JOKE OF A TECH JOURNALIST. ANY RANDOM BLOGGER ON THE NET CAN WRITE BETTER ARTICLES.

[markb325]

What mickytricky is trying to say is


PLEASE DON'T FEED THE TROLLS

[Grr8008]

You say Avast is not the best. I am not saying it is the best either. But have you tried Avast? I find this article pointless. Of course it's not an apology. What are they apologizing for? For trying to be a company that sells things? Now they are giving people something for nothing and people are complaining. I just don't get it.

[Evildave]

And as for an OS from the 1970's, consider how many Micro$uck OSs have come AND GONE in the time that POSIX compliant operating systems have existed. It was stable and secure and well established even when Microsoft bought 'Q-DOS' ('Q' for 'Quick and Dirty') from Seattle Computer Products.

A little bit of stability (and decades of evolving towards perfection) make a great difference over like the kinds of 'Operating Systems' Microsoft poops out every couple of years. DOS wasn't good enough? Start over with Windoze 95. Windoze 95 wasn't good enough? Start over with XP. XP wasn't good enough? Start over with Shista. Shista wasn't good enough? Hey, maybe 'Windoze 7' will be? Maybe not. And every time they 'started over' like that, tons of applications would no longer work in the 'new' OS.

As for 'trolls', listen to yourselves. Anyone who isn't Microsoft sycophant, singing ONLY praises to the great god Microsoft is a 'troll'?

Well, I guess if Kim Jong-il can have a religion, so can Microsoft.

[manny35]

Microsoft giving away something for free has to be regarded with suspicion. Some of their latest updates look as though they have been deliberately targeting some of their rivals on the web which is one of the reasons they are in the European Courts and the fines are building up.
This is meant to tell users they are going into a dangerous site on the web and the most dangerous sites out there are those that rival Microsoft as far as Microsoft is concerned.

[boiadzhievb]

@Lciummo
what a stupid comment :) hahahaah
better ask moderators to remove it! :)

[GOED]

I felt the need to comment right after you mention AVG AND AVAST.
You wrote " Granted that's not great software, but the price is right "

I think you are very wrong, AVG for me was great up to Ver. 7.5 but it fail in stopping some malware so I swiched to AVAST, never looked back. Avast is very advance and it routes internet traffic through it's engine if set properly checking every website / downloads before it delivers to your browser. ALL WITHOUT ANY DELAYS.
In many occassions I have gone to sites where malicious embeded links are present, and avast has immediately holt and gave me the choice to stop the connection / redirection to that site.
I call this Absolutely Great protection and and on top of all it's protection shields is FREE.
That is what I call a GREAT PRODUCT.

[swccman]

I use the full bore paid for AVG. I have another year to go on this license. For some reason, there 65,535 ports to work with. Client side javascript is another matter so I l wish MSFT luck , but I'll keep my AVG.

Grisoft is a Gernman company, the first Microsoft 32 bit run time DLL came from Germany. I know some very good German hackers and Russian hackers as well.

[yankeeDDL]

There's an interesting discussion related to the EU decision to force MS to ship Windows without IE.
While the EU's decision is debatable, the problem is real: IE could have killed the browser's competition thanks to the backing of an almost-monopolistic OS like Windows.
I wonder if this won't trigger the same response. OneCare is optional and sound like the free AV will be optional too (although not clear to me).

[Rdewey]

Sounds interesting I will try it and see if I like it.
I would like to see it succede

[JustDoIt]

Incredible. I can't believe that PC World even allowed David to write such a ridiculous article. I'm here scratching my head and saying to myself, where did they dig this guy up from? I would have thought that PC World would have someone with much more talent when it comes down to this area...what a shame!

[Kinman]

I am not holding my breath.
And I agree if MS really know how to deal with virus and malware, window won't have that much problem in the first place.
I bet this Morro would be the first thing viruses to attack because virus makers deeply hated MS's stupidity.

[quackadilly]

I seriously laughed out loud at the comment by [Lciummo]



But anyways. If MS did switch to a Unix based core, ALL of the virus developers would still target MS because they are the market leader and those viruses might actually work on Macs and such.....So much for Mac security.....

[drx1]

Microsoft does have a lot to apologyze for! So do all the tech tards & mindless managers the have no policies, poor deployment & management practices and simply poop out their 'standard' solution of failure. I do think it goes both ways. For some things MS can give you a good, even secure solution, when deployed properly. OTOH, you have people that won't use any system but MS, for desktop OS, file servers or directory servers.
It would be nice to deploy a total MS solution that is secure ... I mean were security and management of the network systems worked.
Free AV is great for single household or small companies (say less than 20 systems). For larger networks, it usually pays to have a managed approach & tested & enforced policies (yeah, sometimes they don't even have policies). This is where MS fails and 3rd party solutions are required, unfortunately.
Maybe, W7 is the real apology? Then again I have not seengood things from MS Server... But Windows 7 looks solid.
And the *nixes do work very well, and you might be suprised that they are updated frequently, as needed, to keep ahead of MicroSoft. Yeah modern nixes rock.

[yankeeDDL]

I gave the beta a shot and see for myself. Unimpressed. At best.
The interface does not report, real time, the number of visures/malware found. You need to wait for the completion of the scan. I guess they think the users like the "surprise" effect ...
Also there's no estimated completion. The article said it is quite fast ... it scan 80GB of files in few seconds less than 60mins. Avast took 1hr 10mins, Kaspersk just over 1hr, PrevX 3.0 just over 48 minutes, bitDefender run in ~1.5hrs. So MS was not bad, but hardly sometihng to jump off your feet.
Oh, forgot to mention: MS did not catch any of the 16 viruses that I had on my testcase (infecting over 180 files). (One of the viruses was Win32/Vinti-CC)

I noticed also the following:
-MS tool seem the only one that does not do some sort of memory test when installing itself, nor it suggests to do a full scan at startup
-It does not let you run a scan unless you have updated the virus def (that is, right after tthe 1st installation). Now, I do agree that updating the virus def is critical and needs to be pushed for, but a scan with a 1-week old definition is better than no scan. I would say.
-Doesn't seem to have Heuristic.
- It does not offer the possibility to create some sort of rescue disk

As it is, I think it's far behind the competitorand has no real innovating features.
Let's hope it'll get better before people start using it.