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Comment by justinlardinois | Hacker News Reader

Is there any reason for a Windows user to use anything other than Microsoft Security Essentials (or Defender as it's been called since Windows 8)? It's free and everything I've seen and read indicates it works just as well if not better than commercial antivirus suites.

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I have not found a good reason to use anything else. There are things that MSE will not catch, and I was derided by our "computer" company for using MSE instead of a Symantec product that he would have charged us for, but I then showed him an online virus scanner that showed that the particular piece of malware (ransom wear) that we picked up was not detected by either Symantec or MSE. He then conceded "yeah, well I guess any piece of software can't catch EVERYthing."

I have found that MSE is very lightweight and catches almost everything. I have not found a reason to use anything else.

(I manage about 10 Windows PC's at work.)

It doesn't satisfy my auditors. Who can't seem to explain why ("it's not on the list of boxes I can tick"), other than to direct us to the big four of McAfee/Sophos/Kaspersky/Symantec.

Also some versions of ssl vpns scan your computer and I'm not sure if all of them accept the built in MS antivirus.

(Protip: run such connections in a VM. This has a number of benefits:

* when they require a full scan it takes next to no time as the vm is almost empty

* when they cut off the rest of your network except for their site you can still reach google or your company server in the host machine.

* who honestly wants to run all those weird drivers on their day-to-day dev or sysadmin machine?

)

I'm guessing that's due a combination of tradition (Security Essentials hasn't been around as long as the rest) and possibly having business connections with those antivirus companies.

Disappointing either way.

No other reason than that it systematically sucks at stopping malware campaigns compared to pretty much everyone else on independent third party comparisons such as https://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/home-windows/

But at least it's free!

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