Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0 Kills Viruses Dead.
 

Microsoft’s Security Essentials has been our favorite anti-malware application for a while—it’s free, unobtrusive, and it doesn’t slow your PC down, but now it’s even better with the new 2.0 release, which adds network filtering, heuristic protection, and more.

Just to be clear and direct with you: we absolutely recommend Microsoft Security Essentials as your anti-malware / anti-virus utility over any other option—and how can you argue? It’s totally free!

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/38898...nload-it-now./

BLASPHEMY!!!

On a more serious note, I'm gonna give it a try one of these days as I've heard a lot of good things about it. Never tried it but I suppose I should.

especially on midrange & lowrange systems it makes a large difference compared to AVAST and AVG "speed" wise
tried both AVAST/AVG on a single core A64 system, it noticeably slowed the system down; with SE (1.x) you couldn't really notice "performance wise" that there was AV soft running

Speed is one thing, but detection rate is another. A fast AV solution is worthless if it fails to detect a virus. MSSE1 wasn't the best when it came to detection rates, tough for most common viruses I guess it's okay :-p