Microsoft is full of surprises these days, and they really threw out a big one earlier this week.  They announced the full release of their own free anti-virus and anti-spyware product for home AND HOME business users, Microsoft Security Essentials.  That’s a pretty big change, previously there have been several free for home use products available, including my personal favorite – Avast – but none of them are free if you are using them on a “business” computer.  For you, that means if you use your computer in your real estate business – but ONLY if that computer is located at home.  If the computer is located at one of our offices, you’ll need to buy a license as it’s no longer a “home” business.  This product, however, is free.  Which, to put it mildly, surprised me.

Is it good?  Yes, it’s good, it’s not excellent – but it’s right on the “average” mark for detection and cleanup of problems.  At the price point, well, it’s great – it will protect you from most of the nasty stuff out there without any cash outlay on your part.  If you have a product you paid for, however, I wouldn’t remove it in favor of MSE.  For me, I replaced Avast on my personal laptop (which has the free version) with MSE and noted that it uses less system resources (Avast is already one of the lightest, I noticed a big difference going from McAfee to Avast last year), and overall basically left me alone.  It updates itself via Windows Update, and you can see from above it has a very simple and usable interface.  I have about 95GB of data on my hard drive, and it took MSE about 18 minutes to do a quick scan. While running behind the scenes I’ve not noticed it using any resources at all, it’s nearly invisible to me.

Summary: it does pretty good, and I would recommend it for most out there, specifically those with older systems or those closely watching system performance.  If you don’t have a anti-virus product already, and don’t want to pay for one – it’s hard to go wrong with Microsoft’s new product.  If you need any assistance installing MSE on your computer, give the IT department a ring and I know they’d be happy to assist you.

Quick Tip of The Day: Did you know compared to 2008, mobile web browsing increased 34% according to this blog post?   That’s a very interesting revelation, and I’m sure we’ll continue to see more as devices and data plans become more affordable for everyone.  The most notable part of that post, in my opinion, is the stat that seniors rose 67% over the prior year which doesn’t necessarily surprise me, browsing on a iPhone or a Blackberry is admittedly much less intimidating than having a full-blown PC to keep up with.

We’re certainly ready for this traffic, visit HomeRealEstate.com or WoodsBros.com today from your mobile phone and you’ll see our full-featured mobile website (which we continue to improve upon).  If you don’t want to visit from your phone, you can see them on your computer here: HOME and Woods.  You also have a mobile agent website, you can go to your agent site from your mobile phone or simply type m.agentsitename.homerealestate/woodsbros.com on your computer (example: m.bendinger.homerealestate/woodsbros.com).