microsoft security essentials

[tinvek]

not striclty equipment / astro software but may be of use to people

microsoft's free anti virus software is now available.

http://www.microsoft.com/Security_essentials/

first impressions of mine (and a few other users on games forums) is that it's very light on resources, especially proccesor usage when scanning, and seems to do a good job. one guy deliberatly infected his pc with a few virusses and it found them all. also it seems pretty good at not triggering false alarms when it scans other antivirus programs.

given that recently the long time favourite free anti virus software, AVG, has gained a reputation for becoming a bit bloated, this looks like it may actually be a credible alternative and the light resource usage means that it shouldn't interfere with resurce intensive tasks such as image proccessing whilst performing a scan.