So Microsoft Security Essentials (formerly known as Microsoft Morro) is going public today.  This makes me happy!  Why you may ask?  Well, I’ve been one of the lucky technical beta testers and I’m happy to say it has protected me just as good, if not more fully than my old stand-by of ESET NOD32.

It’s light weight, no bloat, no advanced configuration that makes little to no sense, no splash screen, low memory footprint (currently on my Windows 7 desktop at 4.6 MB).  It’s a non-invasive, won’t break your system anti-virus/anti-malware solution.  However, be aware that it does NOT include a firewall (as it simply interfaces with the built-in one in XP, Vista and 7).

So while I was waiting for Windows 7 to install, I decided to do some day dreaming.  Since Windows 7 has the ability to boot .VHD virtual hard disks, could I not create a Windows XP virtual hard disk image properly set up and deploy those in a corporate environment for employees who travel a lot and require administrative access on their systems?  Could I also then if they were to destroy their install, quickly and easily from within a domain-joined or VPN connected login then re-deploy the base image or a backup getting them up and running a lot faster than if I were forced to completely format and re-install or re-deploy from an image (requiring expensive imaging software?).

This may be the solution to that complaint I had about the lack of support for 3D hardware and other features that would be necessary to sand-box employees portable systems with little fuss or muss.  Including the ability to pull the image into a VM (if necessary and having the appropriate conversion software available) to troubleshoot the employee’s problem remotely even.  As long as everyone’s sitting on a Gigabit Ethernet, the entire process would theoretically be painless.

Something for me to keep in mind for the future.