Datatree

February 17, 2012 at 5:42pm

First of all I would like to say that I really enjoy reading the Maximum PC magazine, and have subscribed to it for years now, and I’ve always found the articles to be insightful and helpful. So when your review of Microsoft Security Essentials was published in Maximum PC, I read it and thought it would be a good idea to install it on my machines, specifically Windows 7 PCs, which I did.

I first installed Microsoft Security Essentials on my wife’s machine. The install went well, with no issues, then about 3 months later some strange things started happening – there were more virus alerts and the situation finally culminated in Microsoft Security Essentials indicating that my machine was no longer running a genuine Windows Operating System, but a counterfeit OS. I tried, several times, to apply the key that I have with my Windows software that I bought separately, and it would not allow me to put the key in, but repeatedly asked me to buy a new copy of Windows. After a while the machine’s background went black and it kept giving me error messages, after which it started killing all the applications, and nothing could be started because Microsoft Security Essentials killed every application on the system. At this point, in sheer frustration, I wiped out the system and reloaded it from scratch, after which it seems to be working all right, but still not as well as before I installed Microsoft Security Essentials.

Before these problems began, I had also installed Microsoft Security Essentials on my daughter’s laptop, which is running on Windows 7 Professional, and has been with no problems until 3 days ago, when exact same thing began to happen to her machine. At this point, since this was an eMachines laptop, it had the original software installed on a separate partition, which I managed to wipe out out and reinstall the original configuration.

I am an IT professional, and I have never come across a situation like this, where a product actually runs amok and corrupts the OS key, and I strongly suggest that you investigate this software further before recommending it in a review. As a result of this, I am very disappointed in your magazine’s recommendation, and don’t intend to follow them again.