Microsoft's Security Essentials Hits Back at Hackers - BusinessWeek

An excerpt from a BW review:

I tried Security Essentials on several systems and found that it installed easily and worked flawlessly without noticeably slowing performance. The German lab AV-Test ran its standard tests on Security Essentials and declared it to be "very good" compared with competing products.

At the same time, I don't think Security Essentials is about to drive paid offerings from the likes of Symantec (SYMC) and McAfee (MFE) off the market. These companies sell a variety of security products and services ranging from around $40 to $80 a year for up to three computers, and all are far more comprehensive than Security Essentials. The for-pay offerings include firewalls, anti-­phishing defenses, parental controls, and in some cases data backup services.

Still, I have grown disenchanted with these heavyweight packages. Many of the features duplicate what is already built into operating systems and browsers. Vista and Windows 7, for example, have solid parental controls, and Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.5 have defenses against both phishing attacks and "drive-by downloads" of malware from Web sites.

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Microsoft's Security Essentials Hits Back at Hackers - BusinessWeek