I understand the sentiment, but not everything is “bought and paid for” forever. Antivirus is not a one-time expense but a process and you’re paying people to keep updating the system and continually doing new work to detect and stop new threats.
Like with a car— the car may be paid for, but that doesn’t mean you can expect oil changes for free forever.
Not a very good analogy-LOL. More like when seat belts came out, the OEM’s didn’t make us buy them from a 3rd party, did they?
It’s the same thing. We’re buying cars without seat belts.
So, if MS makes an A/V and ships it in their product, and I don’t like it, I buy something else. That’s fair, that’s a consumer making a choice. The same thing applies if it doesn’t work, I can choose to buy a 3rd party app., and/or not to buy MS’s product. Again, that’s the market in action by consumers making choices.
But, given the dangers, and the competition (who are providing a safer OS environment), we are buying incomplete Operating Systems, like a car without seatbelts.
BTW, I installed Security Essentials on my Win(64) machine and it seems to run nicely. I set the priority to low, and took about 2 hours to scan a 250GB drive, and my Ramomometer (Memory Usage) was only at 38%. Not bad, now let’s see if I catch a nasty. hahaha