“Meet Your Computer’s New Bodyguards” is one of the taglines you’ll see when installing the new Microsoft AntiSpyware beta software. Microsoft today launched its public beta of the software, which is available to download from the company’s web site.

A lot has been said recently about Microsoft’s acquisition of Giant, a company that makes anti-spyware software used to protect computers from prying eyes and privacy leaches.

After installing it and running it, it’s interesting that its flagging things that AdAware and SpyBot S&D don’t alert on. That’s good. In my case, it didn’t hit on anything I wanted to change or remove (I have a few tools on my computer that it sees as potentially problematic, if someone else had put them there, for example.

The UI is nice and clean, and I like the automatic updates (already working). It’s pretty darn IO intensive, so don’t plan to do any disk-related work while it’s performing a check. By default it schedules a scan to happen at 2am each day (you can change this) and it sets up a real-time protection service that works a lot like an anti-virus program does, watching for known spyware and prompting the user for certain types of system changes as they happen.

I really have only one complaint. If I am running a scan and click on any menu item or button in the user interface to to go to another page, my current scan aborts without warning. This is really very frustrating and will likely cause many people to skip completing a full scan because they’d just killed a scan after 10 minutes and would have to start over again.

Overall, great start and I already like the interface and approach better than the other options out there today. Look out, here comes Microsoft – again. This is one area they’ll have to get right, for sure.

(found via NeoWin)