Microsoft’s free new anti-virus product is earning decent marks in preliminary tests, putting it roughly on par with many other stand-alone anti-virus products available today. A number of readers seem keen to try out Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE), but are eager to hear how the program stacks up against other free anti-virus tools in terms of detecting and removing malware. While the results of early testing may not provide that side-by-side comparison, they do offer a glimpse of how effective MSE may be in blocking and tackling some of the most common threats currently in circulation. The MSE performance analysis comes from av-test.org, a group that routinely publishes the results of anti-virus stress tests. AV-Test ran MSE against 3,732 samples of malware that are currently infecting PCs around the world, and found that the program blocked all of them, both when the samples were opened or accessed and when the