Roughly one month prior to the release of Windows 7, Microsoft debuted its consumer antivirus and antispyware solution, Microsoft Security Essentials. This solution does not include a firewall which is understandable since Windows 7 does include one. Microsoft has a sketchy past with previous firewall incarnations that either left systems open for attack or did not provide the customization options that existed in commercial solutions. In this review I will take a closer look at the capabilities of Microsoft Security Essentials and the Windows 7 firewall. I will try to determine if the software giant has managed to stroll into the desktop security space as a solid contender.
Download Microsoft Security Essentials here.
First Impressions
Microsoft Security Essentials is a very small download at just under 7 MB. The installation is rather uneventful, a simple Next, Next, Next, Finish straight forward approach. Thankfully a restart is not required for Microsoft Security Essentials to begin protecting your system. Immediately after installation you are presented with an option to do an initial scan and update of virus and spyware definitions. On my system the scan took less than 15 minutes to complete.
Windows 7 uses a feature called homegroup, which enhances the workgroup feature in order to make home networking easier for all Windows 7 computers. However, this feature doesn’t work on Linux or older version of Windows. In order to connect your Linux computers to Windows 7 computers and share files and folders, you need to make a series of settings. First, it is to change the workgroup, so that all computers belong to one workgroup. In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to configure and change the workgroup on an Ubuntu PC.
