“We decided to and focus instead on something that was much, much broader in its offering,” Muglia says. “We are excited about it. It has received some great reviews.”

Test results published in August by Network World sister publication PC World gave the software a middle-of-the-road review saying, “the app's ability to detect and block malware was neither especially good nor particularly bad.” Security Essentials did well in proactive tests, did not record any false positives, and received a perfect score overall in detecting and cleaning rootkits and malware infection. The review, however, noted a slow scan speed, but qualified the remark by saying it was beta software and that performance could change before release.

The software is supported on Windows XP, Vista and 7.