Microsoft Security Essentials v. Panda Cloud Antivirus Free

[darthfirefox]

i have always heard that panda sucked badly so my vote goes to mse

[sdalgl72]

My vote goes to MSE, but it does need a self protect feature.

[mdfareez]

sdalgl72, i have to agree with you on that. they fail at self-protection, and that's really a big worry. my vote goes for MSE in this battle, though. MSE would easily outclass Panda Cloud Antivirus Free anytime of the day.

[EssentiallyDave]

Last Wednesday I actually downloaded Panda Cloud Free. It was very light & easy to use & I quite liked it. Later in the day I ran a full scan (I'd ran a quick one earlier) & it found three viruses which I realised were false-positives. So I uninstalled it & tried MSE. I'm still using MSE. I think Panda is a bit prone to false-positives as quite a few people have had the same or similar experience as me. It's a shame, as I was a little disappointed with the Panda Cloud because of the false-positives. It might be a freeware AV to watch out for in the future though.

[Hedgehog]

I totally agree with you on that Panda products are seriously prone to FPs,something which is one of the strong points of MSE as it is once in a blue a Moon that MSE gets a FP also I would never trust a primarily Cloud based AV like Panda for a very good reason ie. if a very nasty "Virus" got into your system, and disabled your Internet connection you are a dead duck because there will be no Cloud to perform an on-demand scan with.One more thing, Panda products are also very "unfriendly" with other softwares, you wouldn`t believe but once my Panda Pro AV refused to install unless I uninstalled my McAfee Site Advisor.

[EssentiallyDave]

It's funny you say that about Site Advisor but when I uninstalled my old AV (McAfee), before installing Panda, it gave me the option to keep Site Advisor, but I uninstalled everything (then ran the McAfee uninstallation tool). I have WOT synchronised on all of my browsers so I didn't miss SA that much. I can access it via NoScript anyway.

I can't believe how fast my computer ran with Panda though. Although MSE is very light & there isn't a huge difference between them as far as I can tell. You're quite right, the Achilles Heel of Panda is the fact that cut off from the Net it is a bit limited though. I think Panda might be a good alternative freeware one day. When they fix that f/p bug.

I did think that the Panda UI looked a bit 'tacky' as well. MSE looks very smart & is quite simple. I know it's just a matter of aesthetics but first impressions count!

[gusthebus]

I think MSE is better. Even though panda may be lighter, MSE is light enough for most systems. MSE has better detection rate and doesn't require internet connection. Some rogues/malware may disable your internet and some users may not know how to re-enable it. Overall MSE wins for me because it scored better in Matt's videos, AV-Comparatives scored it better, and it doesn't require an internet connection.

[pranaygtr]

I'm liking the current MSE 2 beta, it updates the VDB through Windows Updates.

Kudos to Microsoft.

[gusthebus]

Beta is looking good. Runs quick on 512 MB RAM/Windows XP virtual PC. Detection rate is looking good in some of the video reviews, looking forward to the final product

[catwinnotm]

MSE