Announcing Windows Defender Beta 2

Hi, I'm Adam Overton, the group program manager for the anti-malware technology team. I'm very excited to be blogging today about the availability of Windows Defender Beta 2 which was announced by Bill Gates at his RSA conference keynote earlier this morning. You can download the new beta version from the Microsoft Download Center

. Users who have Microsoft AntiSpyware Beta 1 already installed do not need to first uninstall this program; the installer will automatically upgrade you to Windows Defender Beta 2. There are a lot of exciting and fundamental changes which we have made with this release and I highly recommend that you check out the press release and fact sheet for more details. As previously announced, updates to Windows Defender will be available at no additional charge to Windows customers.

This is the culmination of many months of hard work by our team to provide the best antispyware solution to our customers. We recently topped 25 million active customers in December with Windows Antispyware Beta 1 and hope to grow our customer base even more with this release of Windows Defender Beta 2. If you have any comments on this release, please feel free to respond to this blog entry or post a message to our newsgroups

. We look forward to your feedback as we work towards our final release.

Thanks,

Adam