Someone over at Microsoft must watch a lot of hockey, because it’s the only way to explain the company’s recent hat trick. First there was Bing, the much-improved “decision” engine that replaced Live Search. Then Windows 7 launched, atoning for Vista. Now we have Microsoft Security Essentials, one of the latest entries into the field of AV, and another winning product from Microsoft.

Essentials scored points with us right off the bat with its supersonic 10-second install time. Even after downloading the latest update, we still hadn’t invested more than a minute or so of our time. And while Vista, Internet Explorer, and other Microsoft software made it easy at times to rag on Redmond for poor resource management, there would be none of that with Essentials, which disappeared quietly into the background.

When it came time to test Essentials, we checked our expectations at the door but were nevertheless pleasantly surprised. Essentials sailed through our synthetic spyware and virus testing without so much as flinching and fared equally well at thwarting our attempts to inflict damage with genuine payloads.

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Like Norton, ESET Smart Security walked away with a Kick Ass award in last year’s roundup, so we were eager to see how the two security suites would compare when pitted against each other in our second annual AV battle royal.

Through the first few rounds of testing, it was near impossible to declare a winner. Both apps remained light on their feet by barely sipping system resources before the two began trading blows. ESET won a round by adding six fewer seconds than Norton did to our system boot time (+14 seconds versus +20 seconds, respectively), but Norton’s a more polished fighter. What do we mean?

ESET lacks a few features found in Norton, including identity protection and parental controls. And while ESET managed to scan our test bed in a little less than eight minutes, which is half the time it took Norton during its first run, ESET doesn’t skip over trusted files to reduce subsequent sweeps, so it’s not nearly as fast in the long run.

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Every fall, you should set the clock back an hour, change the battery in the smoke alarm, and determine whether it’s worth paying for the annual update to Photoshop Elements.

This year, Adobe hits the lucky number eight with the popular photo management app and finally adds the Holy Grail of photo organization tools: face recognition technology. Face recognition software is a boon to those of us who like to push the shutter button but aren’t organized enough to tag the photos with anything useful. With face recognition, the promise is that you won’t have to search through gigabytes of photos anymore, you’ll just ask Elements 8.0 to find all the pictures of Susannah taken in 2009. Elements 8.0 combines the face recognition technology with its smart tagging, so you could also tell it to find all pictures of Susannah that are in group shots that are in focus. Again, the feature goes a long way toward taming our vast gigabytes of digital images.

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