Microsoft Security Essentials / Windows Defender (2015) review

Simple, quiet and unobtrusive, how does Windows 8.1's latest built in security system stack up against the competition?

Despite the name change to Windows Defender, Microsoft Security Essentials is designed to work with the other security features baked into Windows. This includes the Windows Firewall and the SmartScreen website and download filter, and its biggest selling point is that you normally wouldn’t know it’s there. It updates automatically through Windows Update, and sends the few notifications you might see through the standard Action Center in the Windows system tray. It protects in real-time but also allows scheduled and manual scans, and there’s little reason to even open its control panel.

If you do, you’ll find a simple UI with the focus on performing quick, full and custom scans, and on telling you whether the signatures are up to date. You can look through the history and see if any quarantined items deserve to be restored into the wild, while the settings allow you to exclude certain files, locations, file types or processes, and whether or not to scan removable drives.

That’s it. It’s a deliberately simple anti-malware tool, and speedy too, taking around 1min 33secs to complete a scan on our ageing dual-core PC. We also found it light on system resources, not noticeably affecting usability.

The problem is that Security Essentials can’t offer real peace of mind. While the latest update has managed to improve threat detection, in our tests Mirosoft Security Essentials was still compromised by 32% of threats. Its ability to allow legitimate software to work uninhibited did boost its overall accuracy score, but this is still a worrying result for Microsoft's built-in security tool. Honestly, we wouldn't trust our PCs and our data to Security Essentialls. Frankly, neither should you.