Microsoft to Offer Anti-Virus Software for Free From Next Year
 

Software giant Microsoft might offer a free anti-virus software next year, the company said on Tuesday. Code-named "Morro," this streamlined solution will be available in the second half of 2009 and will provide comprehensive protection from malware including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans. This new solution, to be offered at no charge to consumers, will be architected for a smaller footprint that will use fewer computing resources, making it ideal for low-bandwidth scenarios or less powerful PCs.
"Customers around the world have told us that they need comprehensive, ongoing protection from new and existing threats, and we take that concern seriously," said Amy Barzdukas, senior director of product management for the Online Services and Windows Division at Microsoft. "This new, no-cost offering will give us the ability to protect an even greater number of consumers, especially in markets where the growth of new PC purchases is outpaced only by the growth of malware."
When released, "Morro" will be available as a stand-alone download and offer malware protection for the Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems.
With the arrival of "Morro", Microsoft will also discontinue retail sales of its Windows Live OneCare subscription service.

Source: Microsoft

Hmmm if its anything like onecare i think ill pass on that one even if the price is right. =/

Great news. I think there are a lot of people still without AV or using pirate versions... so providing this as part of the windows platform is good news.

BUT, guess what, the EU commission will be all over them. Just like with internet explorer coming free with windows. EU said it was unfair competition. Let's hope the EU can be silenced.

ONE MORE THING PLEASE MICROSOFT. Why oh why dont you improve defragmentation tools, esp. smart placement, and also REGISTRY DEFRAGMENTATION. That's what we would all love to have; optimised systems. :pimp:

Microsoft is going to get sued by McAfee and Symantec. I'm sure all the smaller ones will jump on board too. If Microsoft offers their own product for free, they'll be losing business.

Personally, I think it is long over due. No one is in a better position to counter a virus than the operating system manufacturer. Microsoft should have made their own back when Symantec and McAfee exploited the growing market. Why they waited so long to fix their botched product is beyond me but, I guess it did create a new industry.

LoLs@ McAfee - I dont think their gonna be suing anyone - as it stands McAfee dont exactly have a huge share of the market like symantic does, their BEST consumers are Corporate consumers - Ive worked in banks & at solicitors etc etc where they hand some McAfee security package running. but even then it still gets its pants ripped off by symantic which are the mainstream consumers product.

if anyones gonna complain its the guys from Trend Micro (Pc-Cillin) who are a SMALL company just like McAfee but have a bigger market share as well as being adopted by many corporate consumers.

the dudes from Kaspersky & the guys at ESET (NoD32)

REGISTRY DEFRAGMENTATION, memory defragers dont work well reg defragers do nbut the performance gain would be less than 0.01% completly pointless if it cleans 200 waste keys ,an d there is say a few 100 k keys , yuo get my point. avg is the worst antivirus there is ,i recenly changed to avast and adware for getting ride of spam shit,

I wish more companies had a free AV scanner but I agree no one would be better suited than an OS maker.

On Reg defragging, that actually does help but as was said the gains are nominal. Memory defragging is a sham if you ask me. I dont see how your memory can get fragged :p

I disagree.

Under NTFS, any modification of a registry key will cause registry fragmentation. Leave that for months and the registry hives can be in literally thousands of fragments. That hinders performance and boot times.

Don't confuse registry CLEANERS (removing redundant keys) with defraggers.

lol shoot Ive been using the free version of Avast for a long time now and it has been like the best thing in my life since Barack Obama...(of course dont take this literally)

McAfee and Symantec both suck, Trend isn't much better, CA is worse, Bitdeffender is horrible..

Back to this subject...

Jedi master senses spyware in microsofts antivirus, along with it being programmed in .NET mixed with a program that ends up being worse than Windows Live 1 Care.

yay for microsoft :D

rite so if u have 200 k keys and the reg defrager/cleaner cleans 2000 keys youll get maybe a 1% increase in performance ,waste of time and money unless you use your brain goolge it and find ccleaner.

^^LOL. You can't even read due to your obstinacy! Try re-reading what you quoted :roll:

ok haha your rite how stupid i didnt see that bit, but even defragers will give you performace increases that r not worth payin for ,allthough you can get free ones.

go here for a free one: http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=76620

Bootvis

The XP defrag engine is used by many defrag programs, plus it isn't MS's job toi determine how out of order loading is supposed to be handled by other poorly written software, but you can get a decent performance boost by running all the background tasks and using things like Steams defrag tool for game files.

Although OneCare has improved in terms of detection over the last few years it still has one of the lowest percentages among software packages. Microsoft should have offered OneCare for free years ago (considering they are at least partially at fault for the existence of so much malware), but I guess that is another example of their corporate greed.

http://www.av-comparatives.org/

Heh, pretty obvious I haven't bought anti-virus software in a long time. :laugh:

Off topic: Do any of u guy's know how to remove Antivirus Pro 2008. My cousin installed it cuz she thought that any AV will be ok and when i go to add remove programs, click remove, it only loads the software instead? WTF?? And I tried deleting the folder and killing the process. Restart comes back..

Use SuperAntiSpyware Professional to clean it off. http://www.superantispyware.com/ I have used it several times to clean off variations of the Antivirus Pro 2008